“You defy me?” The beast in my chest reared up. My voice distorted, layering with a growl that wasn’t human. “I am your liege lord, and I gave you an order, Hearthcleft!”
“I don’t give a damn about your title!” Thorven bellowed, shoving me back when I tried to grab his collar. “We lost three men the last time you tried to contain this thing alone—good men who trusted you! I won’t let you add yourself to that count!”
The words hit me to the gut.Three men.
The memory tore through the haze of the curse, the blinding flash of light, the smell of charred meat, the silence that followed the explosion in the lower ward three years ago. I had thought I could hold it. I had been arrogant, desperate, and solitary. And the magic loved it. The curse latched onto that spike of self-loathing. The shadows exploded from my skin, lashing out at the walls, at the stone, at the friends trying to save me. I was losing the shape of the room. The stone floor dissolved into a slurry of grey mist and silver sparks, my vision tunneling down to the terrified, defiant face of my groundskeeper. My spine elongated, cracking audibly as the phantom wings sought to manifest in flesh and bone, tearing at my shirt.
Then, from three floors above, a scream tore through the stone.
High, reedy, and vibrating with absolute terror. It was the wyrmling, my Kirion.
The sound hit the bond between us and time blurred as well in my head. I wasn’t in the dungeon anymore. The dank smell of mold vanished. Rain hammered against my back, soaking my tunic to my skin. I was nineteen. My hands were shaking, coated in mud that looked too much like blood.
“Stay with me,” I begged, my voice cracking.
In my lap lay a tawny-scaled hawk-dragon, one of the sanctuary’s favorites. But where my hands touched its flank, trying to knit a broken wing using the raw power of the ley-line I’d foolishly tried to channel, the scales weren’t healing. They were turning grey.
“No, no, stop.”
I tried to pull the magic back, but it poured out of me like venom. The dragon whined and dissolved. Literally dissolved. The vibrant gold and brown scales turned to ash under my fingers, crumbling away until I held nothing but dust and bone. I had tried to save it, and my unchecked emotion had turned the healing energy into entropy. I had loved it to death.Murderer.
The memory slammed into the present. The grief from that rainy afternoon merged with the panic of the dungeon, and the beast inside me roared in triumph. It drank the pain. It feasted on the guilt.
“The rivets are popping!” Thorven’s shout dragged me back, though the overlay of ash still clouded my sight. He washammering the chisel into the groove of the anchor, sparks flying. “Sir, stop flooding the line! You’re choking the flow!”
“I have to hold it!” I snarled, the voice layered and distorted. “The magic is tainted!”
“You’re not understanding the mechanics, you stubborn fool!” Thorven abandoned the chisel, grabbing my shoulders with daring force. The heat radiating off me should have burned his hands. “Listen to me! The ley-line is a river of power running under the house. The anchors—these stones—are the pilings. They are designed to let the torrent surge past, that is what secures the foundations!”
“The flow is erratic!” I watched the obsidian anchor glow a furious, blinding white. “It destroys everything it touches!”
“Because you’re trying to dam a flood with your own body!” Thorven shouted. He pointed at the runes carved into the wall. “The Wards act as the sluice gates, Fenrik! They are designed to take the excess pressure from the anchor and disperse it into the air—that’s why the dome shimmers! But you’ve clamped down on the anchor so tight the power can’t vent!”
I staggered back, claws scraping against the stone. Was I?
“The system is a circuit!” Thorven said, gesturing wildly between the glowing floor and the rune-etched walls. “Earth to Anchor. Anchor to Ward. Ward to Sky! That is the design! But you’re blocking the transfer between the Anchor and the Ward because you don’t trust the Wards to hold! So the energy is backing up intoyou!”
“If I let it go to the Wards, they will shatter,” I said, the shadow-wings beating phantom air behind me, knocking over a stack of crates. “They are too old. Too weak.”
“Then let them shatter!” Thorven said, grabbing his mallet again. “Better the windows blow out than you turning into a crater and taking the mountain with you! Open the connection, Fenrik! Let the Anchor feed the Ward!”
The wyrmling screamed again from upstairs.
I am doing it again. I am holding on too tight, and everything is turning to ash.
I couldn’t hold nature back. I was just a man. A broken, cursed man standing in the path of a magical tsunami.
“Clear the vent,” I choked out, dropping to my knees.
I withdrew my will. I stopped visualizing my magic as mortar plugging the cracks. Instead, I imagined opening a gate. I tore my power away from the obsidian slab. I let go. I expected the rush of magic transferring to the Wards, and most of all I expected relief. Instead, the dam broke inside me. The silence came first. The archive of my mind, the debts, the spells, the history, the guilt, all vanished. My name dissolved. The room dissolved.
There was only a red tide that crashed over my consciousness. I wasn’t standing on the stone floor anymore; I was floating in a crimson sea, and something else was piloting the vessel of my body. The grey gloom of the dungeon sharpened into clarity. I could see the heat pulsing in the veins of the figure before me. A collection of beating organs wrapped in fragileskin. An obstacle. The creature,Thorven, a small, distant voice whispered, before drowning under the roar, moved. It raised something. A weapon.
The tide surged, turning my blood to molten lead.Silence the threat.The obstacle scrambled back, eyes wide and white, the scent of terror coming off him was intoxicating, a sharp vinegar tang that made my mouth water. He was slow. Prey was always slow.
I raised my hand. A shadow writhed around my arm, lengthening, sharpening. I saw the pulse fluttering in his neck, the jugular. A precise, vital target. One strike to sever the flow. One strike to protect the lair. The world narrowed down to that frantically beating vein.
“I’mtryingto help you, my lord!”
