The darkness swallows him. The cold is total, absolute, the death energy of the underworld closing around him, and he's falling. Not fast but continuously, a descent that has no bottom, that just keeps going down into green-black nothing.
A hand catches his wrist.
The pain is immediate.
White-hot. Blinding. A searing agony that shoots from his wrist up his arm and into his shoulder. August cries out, a raw, animal sound torn from his throat, because this is not Vale's touch. This is not warmth. This is not the impossible exception, the divine intervention, the healing that defies every law of magic.
This is holy magic meeting death-touched flesh the way it was always meant to.
This is what a Templar's touch actually feels like.
It burns.
August's vision whites out. For a terrible, suspended second, all he knows is the pain. Fire consuming his wrist, eating into hisskin, the corruption and the holy energy tearing at each other, and the agony is so total that his fingers start to go slack.
He looks up.
Knox.
Knox is on his stomach at the edge of the void, one hand gripping a crack in the concrete, the other locked around August's wrist. His grey coat is pooled around him on the platform, streaked with bone dust and ichor from the fight, and his face is tight with effort. Muscles straining, teeth gritted against the pull of the abyss, desperately trying to hold onto someone larger than him.
He doesn't let go.
Knox's holy energy radiates from his grip in waves that August feels as fire pressed against bare flesh. Every nerve in August's arm is shrieking. The corruption on his wrist is reacting, darkening, thickening, rising up in defense against the holy assault, and the resulting clash of energies is tearing August's skin apart at the molecular level.
The void pulls at him from below. Knox's burning grip is the only thing between him and an eternity of falling.
And August has a choice.
His free hand is hanging at his side, fingers curled against the pain, every instinct screaming at him to twist free of the grip that's hurting him. Years of running from Templars, years of knowing their touch means pain and capture and death, every survival reflex he's ever developed is firing at once, telling him to let go, get free, escape the burning.
August reaches up with his free hand and grabs Knox's arm.
The pain doubles. Holy energy sears into both wrists, both hands, and August screams through his teeth. A high, ragged sound that echoes off the tunnel walls and reverberates through the shrinking void. His skin is blistering where Knox holds him, the corruption and the holy magic fighting each other at thepoint of contact in a way that Vale's touch has never produced, and the combined agony is worse than anything the corruption itself has ever done to him.
He holds on tighter.
Because Knox dove for him. Because Knox is lying on his stomach at the edge of an abyss, holding onto a necromancer whose skin is burning under his grip, and he hasn't flinched. Hasn't hesitated. Hasn't let go. August is too depleted from the rift to hurt Knox back. His death magic is guttered to almost nothing, wrung out by three anchors and the corruption reclaiming his body, and whatever Knox feels at the point of contact is his own holy energy rebounding against itself, not August's power fighting him. Knox is burning himself to save someone who can't even put up a fight.
That makes it worse, somehow. And better. Both at the same time.
"I've got you," Knox says, and his voice is strained and certain and the kindest thing August has ever heard. "August. I've got you. Help me."
August grits his teeth so hard he thinks they might crack. He kicks against the void's edge, finds a foothold in the crumbling concrete, and pushes. Knox hauls backward with the strength of an eighty-year-old Templar who is, evidently, far stronger than his friendly demeanor suggests. Between them, August fighting for purchase and Knox refusing to yield, they drag August up inch by agonizing inch. His torso clears the edge. Then his hips. Then his legs, and Knox pulls him onto the solid concrete of the platform and they both collapse, gasping and shaking and burned.
Knox releases him.
The absence of pain is almost as shocking as the pain itself. A sudden vacuum where the burning had been, leaving August's wrist throbbing and raw and screaming in the aftermath. He lieson the concrete breathing in ragged gulps, staring at the ceiling of the subway station, and feels the void behind him shudder and seal shut with a sound of a held breath finally released.
The rift is closed. The abyss is gone. The platform is whole again. Cracked and scorched and ruined, but solid. Real.
August lifts his hands in front of his face. Knox's handprint is seared into the skin of his left wrist. Five distinct fingers, the palm, burned red and raw and blistering against the pale grey tracing of corruption. His right hand, where he'd grabbed Knox's arm, is the same. Blistered, angry, the shape of his own desperate grip branded into his skin. The burns are vivid and precise and they hurt with a steady, pulsing fire that makes his eyes water.
This is what Templar touch does. This is what every Templar's touch would do to him.
Every Templar except one.
Then Vale is there.
