Options, Cyrus said—not a question but a demand for tactical assessment.
I pulled up three scenarios on my tablet, each one impossible but necessary.
Option one: Complete the drain. Force it to process the master’s full life force reserve. Kill him rather than contain him.
Cost? Marigold asked quietly.
The lattice won’t survive it. Too much energy too fast. It’ll rupture the boundary, destabilize the convergence point. Cascade failure across the corruption network before we can establish the other four lattices.
Global catastrophe. The exact scenario we were trying to prevent.
Option two: Seal him imperfectly, accept the leak, and monitor him perpetually with active containment.
That just delays the problem, Elio observed, his truth magic still burning while maintaining the overlay even as the quarantine leaked. Eventually the leak destabilizes enough to rupture anyway, and we have to commit resources to monitoring instead of cleansing.
Yes, I agreed. But it buys time. Months, maybe years.
Option three? Cyrus’s voice was flat, clinical. He already knew.
We redesign on the fly, modify the termination rules to handle an infinite source while creating a drain that can bleed him slowly instead of trying to process everything at once.
Marigold stood, moving to the quarantine’s edge. Scout pressed against her neck, anchoring. Her necromancy extended carefully—not touching the master’s consciousness yet but feeling the drain struggling to function.
I can do it, she said quietly.
Mari…
I can modify the termination rule. Her dark brown eyes met mine across the chamber with certainty and resolve. The drain is based on my cycle authority. On death as natural ending. I can adjust it to enforce a slower bleed, turning the master from infinite to finite, but gradually instead of all at once.
Cost? I asked, though I already suspected.
I have to channel directly through the quarantine, touch his consciousness with my necromancy. I’ll hold that connection for as long as it takes to establish the modified termination rule.
Horror settled in my chest.
That’s insane, Elio said bluntly. He’ll corrupt you. The moment you touch his consciousness directly…
Not if I anchor through the wellspring. Marigold’s hand pressed to the stone floor of the chamber. Through Wickem’s consciousness and the network beyond. I’m not touching him alone. I’m touching him through every wellspring simultaneously, a distributed load.
That’s still… I started.
It’s the only option that works, Keane. Her voice held absolute certainty. You said it yourself. We can’t kill him without destabilizing everything. We can’t contain him imperfectly without eventually failing. So we modify the drain to handle what he actually is instead of what we designed for.
She was right. Mathematically, tactically, strategically—she was right.
But it meant putting her in direct contact with the master’s consciousness and risking her to fix my incomplete design.
How long? Cyrus asked, already accepting and calculating containment protocols in case things went wrong.
Five minutes to establish the connection. Ten to encode the modified termination rule into the lattice architecture. Another five to verify it’s stable.
Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of Marigold’s consciousness touching the master’s while I guided her through dimensional mathematics she’d never studied, Elio held truth overlays that kept both of them from being deceived, and Cyrus stood ready to burn the connection if corruption jumped.
Marigold looked at Cyrus. Not asking permission but questioning whether if he could hold the line if she went in.
He met her eyes for one second before nodding once.
Do it, I said, not because I wanted to but because it was the only choice that didn’t guarantee failure.
