I keep reaching.
My fingers close around the core—a mass of compressed soul-debt, hot and writhing and desperately alive. The golemshrieks with a thousand voices. Every face screams. The sound tears at my sanity, at the edges of who I am.
I tear the core free.
It comes loose in a spray of black ichor and scattered paper. The golem convulses—once, twice—then collapses. Not into nothing. Into a rain of contracts, a storm of paper, pages scattering across the ruined chapel. The faces stop screaming. The tentacles go limp. For one long moment, there’s silence.
Then I hit the ground.
I land in a spreading pool of my own blood. The contracts are still crawling across my arm. Burrowing deeper. The words they’re writing burn: DEBT TRANSFERRED. SOUL CLAIMED. PROPERTY OF THE LEDGER MASTER.
My vision grays at the edges. The chapel ceiling swims above me—what’s left of it, shattered stone and broken rafters. I’ve lost too much blood. Taken too much damage. The construct’s contracts are trying to finish what its claws started.
This is how I die. Claimed by paper. Bound by ink. Just another defaulter in the Ledger Master’s collection.
Hands grab my arm.
Small hands. Human hands. Ivalys’s hands, pressing against my flesh, against the contracts trying to consume me.
“He’s not yours.”
Her voice cuts through the screaming. Not loud—quiet, steady, certain. But there’s power in it. A resonance that reverberates through my bones.
The mark glows—not yellow like debt-magic, but white. Pure white. The color of truth in a city built on lies.
The contracts on my arm writhe. Smoke rises where her palm presses against them. The words they’ve been writing—CLAIMED, OWED, PROPERTY—catch fire from within, burning themselves out letter by letter.
“He’s not yours,” she repeats. Louder now. Her voice layered with harmonics that shouldn’t exist, carrying weight that makes the air itself bend. “He broke his contract. He chose to be free. And you can’t claim what’s already been released.”
The contracts burn.
Not with ordinary fire—with truth-fire, cold and white and absolute. It consumes the paper and the claims and the reaching grasp of the Ledger Master’s will. The words seared into my flesh fade, replaced by clean skin. Well. Cleaner. Still covered in blood.
When the light fades, Ivalys’s palm is smoking.
She stares at her hand. At me. At the ash that used to be contracts scattered across my arm.
“You...” My voice is raw. Broken. “That was truth-speaking.”
“I know.” She’s trembling. Her whole body shaking with the aftermath of whatever just moved through her. “We need to move. Can you stand?”
I shouldn’t be able to stand. I’ve lost enough blood to kill a human twice over. My shoulder is dislocated. My ribs are cracked. Half the skin on my arms has been torn off by dead mouths.
I stand anyway.
She catches me when I sway—one arm around my waist, her shoulder braced under my good arm. The sigil on her palm is still warm where it presses against my side. I lean on her more than I should. More than I want to admit.
“The Bone Market.” Each word costs me. “North entrance. Ask for Madame Viscera.”
We stagger out of the ruined chapel, leaving a trail of blood and burned paper behind us.
∗ ∗ ∗
