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That is why the oldest charters account for incapacity. A great house cannot cease to exist because its lord cannot speak. Authority passes through protected forms until judgment can be made under the Arbiter’s balance. Varrus expects Fiona to know only herbs and household disputes. He does not know how many nights she has spent reading laws that once treated humans solely as property, searching their margins for powers the writers failed to deny a Lady.

There must be another defense.

House law.

The thought forms through the fog of numiscu. Morwen’thir predates the current royal line. Its charters preserve protections granted when dark elf houses first bound the Causadurn Ridge beneath the Arbiter’s balance. I have studied every clause, as has Fiona since I opened the ancestral library to her.

She does not know all of them.

I cannot speak the words.

But speech is not the only path between us.

The connection created through marriage, intimacy, and chaos magic remains limited. It carries emotion without permission and, with effort, brief images. It cannot open her thoughts to me. It cannot bear conversation. Distance weakens it, and control becomes uncertain under pain.

Numiscu obstructs my magic now, but it has not erased the bond.

I find Fiona’s presence through the poison. It is not a voice or a place. It is warmth near the boundary of my awareness, threaded with fear, anger, and fierce concentration.

I push toward it.

Pain tears along the cursed scar beneath my clothes. The old wound reacts to the strain, sending white heat through my side. My body cannot arch or recoil. Only my sight blurs.

Fiona turns fully toward me.

She felt something.

I need an image precise enough to guide her and narrow enough to cross the damaged connection.

The ancestral library rises in memory. Iron-bound doors. My house ring pressed against the locking plate. Internal teeth rotating behind black metal as chaos answers Morwen’thir blood and authority.

I choose the locking mechanism rather than the door.

Its diagram lies in the oldest charter volume, inked beside the rules governing a lord rendered insensate within his own keep. Fiona examined that page three nights ago while tracing changes in household authority. She remarked that dark elves hide law inside mechanisms as though plain words might escape.

Above the mechanism, I place the Arbiter’s sigil.

The balanced mark is simple: opposing forms held around a central line, neither permitted to consume the other. It seals the charter and sanctifies its oldest clauses.

Mechanism. Sigil. Lock.

I add the sensation of the library doors refusing pressure from outside. Not the chamber doors before us, not an order to barricade this room, but the principle embedded in the design: authority recognized within, intrusion denied without. Fiona must connect that principle to the charter illustration. Anything more complex will dissolve before it reaches her.

Not words.

Direction.

I force the joined image across the connection.

The effort meets numiscu like a gate barred from the opposite side. Chaos stirs weakly in my blood, catches against the poison, and recoils. Black motes tremble above my right hand.

Varrus notices them.

“His magic is unstable,” he says. “Move away from him.”

Fiona ignores him.

Her gaze holds mine. Confusion touches the bond first. I send the image again, reducing it to its clearest lines: the iron locking teeth from the library diagram, the Arbiter’s sigil laid over them, the sensation of a barrier closing against unlawful entry.