I reach into my chest.
The motion is instinctive—I don’t remember deciding to do it. My fingers push through flesh that isn’t flesh anymore. Into the hollow where my heart used to be.
And I find it.
The contract-heart. Every unfulfilled debt I’ve claimed in three centuries. Every soul I’ve marked, every obligation I’ve recorded, every broken promise I’ve catalogued. Countless debts compressed into pulsing darkness. Countless chains waiting to bind any soul that touches it.
I built this over three hundred years. Fed it with every default, every collection, every soul that passed through my Hall owing more than they could pay. It’s the repository of my power. The engine of my control. The thing that makes me more than the scribe’s son who shuffled papers in a basement.
I tear it free.
The pain is?—
I don’t have words. I haven’t felt anything in so long, and now I feel everything at once. Three centuries of deferred sensation crashing through me. The agony of pulling out my own heart. The terror of mortality returning. The rage—the endless, burning rage that started all of this.
I feel myself dying. Feel the thread that connects me to existence fraying. Without the contract-heart, I have minutes. Maybe less.
But I have enough time for this.
The contract-heart pulses in my grip. Black and twisted, pulsing with malevolent light, screaming with the voices of souls I’ve consumed. It’s heavy. Heavier than it should be. Weighted with all the debts it contains.
One thousand claims. One thousand chains. Enough to bind even a truth-speaker. Enough to drag her down into the same debt-slavery I’ve imposed on Gravebind for centuries.
If I’m going to die—if she’s going to destroy me—then I will not die alone.
“IF I FALL,” I scream, and my voice shatters the courtly composure I’ve maintained for three hundred years. Volume. Finally, volume. The roar of a dying thing that refuses to go quietly. “EVERYONE FALLS WITH ME!”
∗ ∗ ∗
