August throws both hands forward and shadow detonates from him, a concussive blast of darkness that hits the skeletal mage full force. The green fire sputters and dies. The skeleton shrieks as August's power wraps around it and crushes inward, bones collapsing with a sound that echoes through the tunnel.
The cost is immediate and visible. The black veins surge across August's throat, his jaw, his cheeks, creeping toward his eyes. He staggers. Catches himself. His jaw clenches with a determination that makes something in Vale's chest tighten, because the man is killing himself and he knows it and he did it anyway, without hesitation, because the alternative was letting the threat through.
"Fall back!" Vale calls, cutting down two more warriors in quick succession. The numbers are thinning, the flow from therift is slowing. He has enough time to get a blessing circle down if August can cover him from range. "Get clear of the rift!"
He waits until August has moved, not far enough to be out of the fight but far enough to be outside the circle's boundary, and then he drops to one knee. He presses his silver-ringed hand flat against the subway platform and channels.
The blessing starts in his chest. Radiates outward through his arm, his hand, his fingers, into the stone. He feels the circle growing, a ring of holy light expanding from his palm, racing across the platform in a widening arc that encircles the rift in blazing symbols and sacred geometry. The light is warm and fierce and absolute. Around him, he can hear August's voice, hoarse and unwavering, turning back the remaining undead as they emerge.
"Leave this place," August tells them. Not commands. Tells, the way you tell someone the truth because they deserve to hear it. "Return to death. This world is not for you."
The blessing circle solidifies with a sound that rings through the tunnel and silences everything else, a single crystalline note. The undead caught within its boundary turn on August's command, shuffling back through the rift with dazed compliance. The rift still pulses, still breathes, but nothing else comes through. Anything that tries will hit the blessing circle and burn.
Silence.
Real silence. The kind that rushes in to fill a space that was, moments ago, full of screaming and steel and the grinding of dead bone. The kind that feels less like an absence of sound and more like the world exhaling.
Vale's steady breathing. August's ragged gasps. The distant drip of water somewhere in the tunnels. Nothing else.
Vale climbs to his feet and turns to check on August.
His stomach drops.
The necromancer is standing, but only technically. The black veins are so thick and dark there's no visible skin left on his arms, and his tattoos have vanished entirely beneath the corruption. His eyes are glassy and unfocused, and he sways with the boneless looseness of a man who's already falling and just hasn't hit the ground yet.
"August—"
August's legs buckle.
Vale lunges. He drops his sword, lets it clatter to the platform, the blade's light dying as it leaves his hand, and catches August before he hits the concrete. He withdraws the active blessing from his palms on instinct, knowing that holy energy against death-touched skin should be agony, and wraps his arms around the necromancer's too-light frame to keep him upright.
The moment his bare hands close around August's arms, something happens.
Not pain. Not the searing rejection of opposing magics that three centuries of experience tell him to expect. Something else, something that moves through both of them with a certainty that takes none of Vale's intentions into consideration and instead chooses to draw upon something deeper and older than either of them.
Power surges between them. Warm, bright, undeniable. The holy magic that lives in Vale's blood, that has been part of him for three hundred years, flows outward with a will of its own. He tries to hold it back, tries to control it, and finds that he can't. It moves without his permission, pouring from his hands into August's skin with a certainty that bypasses everything Vale knows about how magic works.
And where they touch, the black fades.
Not completely. Not all at once. But visibly, dramatically, the corruption recedes. The veins lighten, thin, retreat.
August gasps. His entire body goes rigid with shock, then shudders, a full-body tremor that runs through him from his shoulders to his hands. His unfocused eyes snap clear, grey and vivid, and fix on Vale's face with an expression that is equal parts wonder and terror.
"What—" His voice cracks. His own hands come up to grip Vale's forearms, not pushing away but holding on. "What are you doing?"
Vale stares at where his hands meet August's skin, at the corruption steadily retreating under his touch. His holy magic is flowing into a necromancer, and instead of destroying him, instead of burning through death-touched flesh the way it should, the way it always has, the way every piece of Templar doctrine says it must, it is healing him.
He can feel the moment August registers that the pain is receding. The necromancer's breath hitches, a small, involuntary sound, startled and raw, and when Vale's hands tighten instinctively, August shudders again. Something hot coils tight and low in Vale's stomach, and he forces himself to ignore it.
This is not the time. Not the place.
Not the person he should be having this reaction to. Except that his hands disagree, and his magic disagrees, and apparently years of Templar training have no useful commentary on what to do when your holy power decides to heal the dying necromancer in your arms instead of destroy him. He's never read a manual for this. He suspects one doesn't exist.
The black veins continue to fade under his palms. Not disappearing, not fully, but retreating to something manageable. Something survivable.
"Are you okay?" Vale's voice is rough.
August is staring at him with those grey eyes, and Vale has never seen anyone look so simultaneously strong and shattered.Like someone who has been bracing for impact for so long that the absence of it is harder to process than the hit would have been. "This shouldn't be possible. Your magic should be killing me right now."
