- Local time
- Today 3:33 PM
- Messages
- 10
- Pronouns
- none
The thirteenth hour struck the tower's clockface; one hidden from reality, and below, a priestess prepared her spirit.
Liora Anselme performed the rite of sanctification. The pads of her index and middle fingers pressed into the hollow of her throat, into the soft skin until she felt the rhythmic pulse of her lifeblood. She held there, a sharp throbbing pinning her mortal heart to the divine. Only when it stirred against her fingertips did she begin.
"I am the Lord who heals you, so says the olden text. Redeem us, O Lord, we pray, and cleanse our wicked ways."
Hallowed canticles of the Blessed Order sprouted from within the rot and cacophony of the thoroughfare. Traders, boisterous crowds, and performers stifled their mongering as she began a melodic hymn-like sermon.
An alms song of healing scriptures hushed curious onlookers; weary ears felt the touch of God. Calloused hands unknotted, and the ache of labor ebbed into a flowing river of words.
Burdens that curled bones and anchored pain surrendered elders. Arthritis, fevers, and coughs were whisked from listeners’ bodies by the gentle flow of renewing psalms. For a respite, the square was no longer a place of commerce, but a sanctuary where infirmities had been persuaded to leave.
Pigeons wreathed over the priestess at the bell tolls from rooftops. A cobbler removed his hat in reverence, and the flower girls bowed their heads. The countenance of sacred text sung aloud roused the hearts of some, and all eyes rested upon her holy recitation. "Praise be!" A few souls rejoiced in the warmth of heavenly mercy. The sound of grace uplifted most yet strangled one desperate for a miracle.
A stone’s throw along the outer rim, a heartbeat stalled in his shackled breaths as a hooded mage rounded the far corner alley where brick and darkness could hide him. The hymn carried farther than sound should, pressing against his ribs as if the square itself leaned outward, searching.
Elowen Rosemoon’s lips moved in accordance with the incantations in a tome too heavy to hold politely. Every step tarried with the weight of stretched seconds. Left eye half-lidded against the sting of sweat, his gaze found the priestess and her song. What came next was not the theft of voice alone but the heresy of stolen grace. It was only for a moment before the woven words slipped through his teeth.
“I take the breath you do not need, and turn your melody to lead. Let your music die within my throat, a heavy shroud, a muffled coat. I trade your grace for a ghost’s intent; your tune is spent, my sound is sent.”
The change did not arrive loudly.
One,
Then another,
Then, a final.
It was three heartbeats that took her voice.
Liora’s song squelched from within her vocal cords, sequestered from the hearts of humble listeners. Some gasped, others searched each other's faces.
Her focus scattered in all directions, soft nails touched her chin, and a cold shudder pulled at her chest. She tried to sing the recitation of restoration as the crowd exhaled, afraid to commit irreverent noise in the sudden silence.
Echoes inverted into absence. Every step and scrape of the mage’s cloak mummed with abandon as he tore through the alley. Downhill, the cobblestones forgot the crunch of frost as he skipped over odd steps in hastened footfalls bound for the observatory. Behind him, a scant distance away, a metallic whistle peeled the air as uniformed men and spectral hounds on his heels resumed their pursuit.
The alley spilled him into a dim quarter where he grazed corners. Wet sheets on a clothesline slapped him as he scraped a shoulder and almost tripped, above him, the Star Gazer spire rose like a blind eye toward the sky.
A silvered Chronomirror clicked ajar when he jerked it from his breast sleeve. The ticking time-piece shone pale as his bruised thumb traced a triangle on its face. It flickered once. Dials and numbers phased to a public broadcast and sharpened into the high tiered seats of the Edenic Magisterium.
Court bells rang through the apparatus, drowned beyond the mage's radius of silence. Each toll a measured gavel; at the center of a white-marble altar stood the accused. Even through the static glass, his exhale brushed the image of her porcelain semblance and stayed in the delicate dip of her collar where a jade necklace rested proudly. The one he gave her on their anniversary.
She smoothed a lock of hair; shorn of its ornamental braids in procedural disgrace behind a slender ear that tapered to a fine point. Her leaflet earrings outshone the hollow glow of the courtroom.
“The archives burn! By the Ether Warden writ, he is taken dead.” Shadows outpaced the men, their serrated reach snapped at Elowen’s heels.
“Close ranks! Hounds have his print!” the warden-captain's voice cut through the press. From the flank, a clatter of iron boots. Spectral barks bit through the usurped quiet.
The mage lunged into the observatory’s threshold and slammed his weight against the timber as a shade raked the doorframe. He slumped, gasping, clutching his chest. The magical dampening field took hold. Outside, baying familiars and trailing voices faded into muffled echoes toward the lower streets.
He looked down, the silver brass rippled with the condemned's face.
Silk draped her shoulders. Pale, translucent, pronounced penitent before the verdict. The cut was ceremonial and the thinness was cruelty. Her modesty; a clemency revoked.
Her chin lifted anyway. "Ilarya Althea-Verseryis, Envoy of the Edenic Consulate stands accused." The Prosecutorus began. Elven eyes shone like glass heated past its melting point, bright, one degree from shattering.
Elowen's grip went white on the Chronomirror. He shaped the triangle again, harder, as though conviction alone could turn glass into a door. He mouthed her name with his lips. The spell kept it.
Ilarya’s gaze lifted. “Elowen… my beloved.”
Her porcelain mask fractured; a lone pearl of grief traced the curve of her cheek.
“I beg of you, see me through this tribulation.”
Grave-faced elves and heavy robed men of waxed composure murmured with quiet relish. A Magisticiar inclined his head, his voice carried a calm, surgical precision.
“So. This absence is the devotion that purports to defy our Law.”
The Prosecutorus did not deign to look at her as he spoke. “Let the record reflect: the accused invokes a consort who does not answer.”
The Chronomirror creaked under Elowen's grasp. He rested it against the star charts. The gavel hung in miniature over Ilarya's frame, suspended.
Teeth ground against the ticking. The tome slammed open. Pages tore. Ink smeared across his fingers as he flipped through diagrams, ripping a corner through star-lattice, through margins that creased; 'Heed thee well, deviate not. Beware Tohol’Nazutl.' wiped away, ignored.
Where: Coordinates locked.
How: Somatic triggers identified.
His thumb searched the binding crease. Pages flapped like panicked wings.
The temporal anchor, -the When- buried in a fold he'd skipped.
Chalk squealed across stone. The sigil emerged jagged, shaking hands turning clean geometry into desperate scrawl. The glyphs traced the wall like veins of broken mercury, mangled as he forced the final stroke.
The air split.
Not light.
Static.
A grinding like glass dragged over iron. The portal clawed itself agape, resisting, the edges pulsing unstable, hungry.
Heat lashed his face. His palm burned where chalk-dust burrowed into flesh, the sigil branding itself as price.
Behind, the Chronomirror blinked.
The gavel fell.
He dredged for a breath, nearly retching. The inhale a jagged spasm, the exhale a desperate shudder, his lungs finished something he hadn’t started. Stasis kept his bones and blood from remembering motion until the rhythm settled.
Rising, his balance faltered, not from weakness, but from viscosity. Something clung to him. Not enough to pin him. Enough to glue spores to his skin when he moved.
The shadows did not welcome him; they merely waited. Elowen’s knees hit the dirt in a pool of cooling shade cast by a wall of jagged glass and rusted iron. The portal vanished with the crack of a spark. Silence clogged in his ears. He kept his brow against the earth.
"Ilarya." His breath fractured.
He forced the syllables of the North Gate conjuration through his teeth, but the words met only empty air. No snap of reality followed. No scent of temple incense or rain-slicked stone rose.
The air tasted of moist, hostile green and fungal rot. It clung to the back of his throat, warm and heavy.
He shoved himself upward, palms scraping against a pillar of porous stone that crumbled like bone. He looked for cobblestones; he found only black ribs of metal jutting into a canopy of paleotechnic scale. Vines thick as ship moorings engrafted around skeletal towers.
Bile rose in his throat. He looked at his shaking hands, then at the glass teeth of the skyline. He turned from the ruins back toward the alley, his fingers clawing at the empty air where the courtroom should have been.
A flicker of artificial, soul-less light washed over his knuckles from the alley’s mouth. He lurched.
A wall of black crystal and pale metal stood across the street, taller than three fathoms and gate-wide. Its surface was perfectly flat. No seams. No curvature. No evidence of hand or chisel. As the first edge of dawn touched it, the glass ignited without reflection.
The onyx surface bloomed in a sharp, rectangular burst. The beam did not spill. It held acicular edges. It gleamed as the sun climbed, drawing brighter with every breath of morning. No glyph flared. No runes stirred. Nothing moved but the projection itself.
Etherwaves stabilized. A woman’s face filled the surface. Familiar high cheekbones and hair like spun moonlight pulled a whisper from his lips, but the ears did not taper to the elegant points of his betrothed. They were slightly rounded. Untapered, softened by human blood.
A half-breed.
Not his beloved.
The image held the jade at her throat. The setting matched his memory, but the metal caught the green wrong. It did not dull. It did not age. The face smiled. Posed. Then vanished, replaced by a human. Then an orc-featured woman. The transition was seamless.
No cut.
No pause.
The sequence restarted.
All wore the same silks. The same weave. Cloth forbidden to be shared hung identical on each body. Bloodlines that drew steel in his world smiled from the same frame. His world had burned for such unity. This world had collapsed despite it.
Motes slid over his hands. Color shifted with each face. His knuckles, chapped raw by the portal’s discharge, painted bizarre hues that did not belong to dawn. He stood unlit, but the glow reached him anyway. He lifted a hand.
At his temple, among the raven strands, a coarse thread of gray caught the spectrum. It had not been there when he knelt in the observatory and did not bend with the others. It held its shape, brittle against his skin.
Above, the canopy stirred.
A bulk knifed the canopy.
The shape didn't move like a bird. It displaced sky. Orange-red plumage caught the bruised glare of dawn, metallic, aposematic. A warning no one was left to heed. Eyes clustered the edges of its wings. Smaller ones studded its haunches, its tail. They did not blink. They measured. Elowen braced himself against the pillar.
The Dawnwyrm scoured the block once. Twice. Claiming territory.
Then, its maw unhinged. The roar punched his chest with pressure; it thrumbed the marrow and jolted his vision.
It struck his sternum like a fist, rattled his teeth, bleached his vision. Glass exploded from the animated sign. Shards rained. A mutated monkey-rachnid bolted from the rubble and made it three leaps before the monstrosity's head cleaved down. The beak gaped. Backward fangs folded the animal inward. No scream. Just wet compression.
The stillness that followed was worse.
Elowen's breath snagged. He tasted blood where he'd bitten his cheek.
Saliva pooled,
thick,
copper-tasting.
He forced a swallow instead and felt his pulse hammering against his knotted throat.
Above, the predator loomed.
Tracking.
Then it landed on the tower's peak. Its wings furled with boastful precision, each gesture deliberate. It turned, orange plumage catching light, and began. The dance was not graceful.
It was flaunting, a primal display older than the ruins, older than the city. Wings flared. Head canted. Talons scraped concrete in rhythm. Flicking tentacles at its crown swayed, tasting the air for disruption. Elowen tucked himself into cover, lungs burning.
He couldn't move. Any sound, any motion, and it would pivot mid-dive and end him. His mind raced where his body couldn't.
"Bewitched her. Coerced, no. Tricked. Say tricked. She had no choice. I gave her no choice. Let them believe it. Let her live."
The words tasted rancid. She'd once held his face when he tried to lie to himself, when his mother passed –said, "Don't. Not with me."
The pillar crumbled under his weight. He lunged, feet skidding on mossy stone, and crossed into a shaft of sunlight before he understood the mistake.
The creature's head tilted. Every eye along its left wing rotated toward him. Then it swooped.
Elowen threw himself aside as the beak sheared past just close enough that he felt wind pressure graze his neck. He hit the ground shoulder first, and bit down on a scream. His shin scraped concrete, blood welled hot.
The abomination wrenched skyward, wings whipped wide. It perched on the tower's edge, orange feathers blazing in the dawning sun. The tentacles at its crown swayed, tasting his heartbeat through the air. The tome was still in his other hand. Pages crumpled against his ribs.
"Need to die for her."
"Must survive."
His hands shook as he flipped through pages. There, buried in a crease he'd torn through: temporal anchor, bound by breath and star.
No chalk.
No time.
He smeared blood from his knee across the stone. The sigil formed crooked, desperate. His lips moved through the binding phrase, each syllable a risk.
The predator's chest ballooned, then engorged. Chitinous feathers bristled.
The roar came point-blank. His vision went white. Warmth spilled from his ears, wet, immediate. The world tilted. Sound collapsed into a hummed ringing.
The air tore.
The portal snapped open behind him, edges flickering, hungry. He didn't look back.
Then,
–through.
He landed on white marble, knees first. The courtroom spun.
Mouths contorted. Brows knit. Shock... Incredulity, maybe. But he heard nothing, only his own pulse. The assemblage leaned forward in a soundless wave, the world remained a high, distant whine.
Ilarya’s eyes found his. Verdant irises trembled at the contact. Her chin rose a fraction and her lips shaped his name.
Forced upright, blood dripping from his jaw, his hands shook as he raised them, palms out.
The ringing devoured his confession, but he felt the words leave his mouth, each one a vow laid on an altar he would never leave.
Liora Anselme performed the rite of sanctification. The pads of her index and middle fingers pressed into the hollow of her throat, into the soft skin until she felt the rhythmic pulse of her lifeblood. She held there, a sharp throbbing pinning her mortal heart to the divine. Only when it stirred against her fingertips did she begin.
"I am the Lord who heals you, so says the olden text. Redeem us, O Lord, we pray, and cleanse our wicked ways."
Hallowed canticles of the Blessed Order sprouted from within the rot and cacophony of the thoroughfare. Traders, boisterous crowds, and performers stifled their mongering as she began a melodic hymn-like sermon.
An alms song of healing scriptures hushed curious onlookers; weary ears felt the touch of God. Calloused hands unknotted, and the ache of labor ebbed into a flowing river of words.
Burdens that curled bones and anchored pain surrendered elders. Arthritis, fevers, and coughs were whisked from listeners’ bodies by the gentle flow of renewing psalms. For a respite, the square was no longer a place of commerce, but a sanctuary where infirmities had been persuaded to leave.
Pigeons wreathed over the priestess at the bell tolls from rooftops. A cobbler removed his hat in reverence, and the flower girls bowed their heads. The countenance of sacred text sung aloud roused the hearts of some, and all eyes rested upon her holy recitation. "Praise be!" A few souls rejoiced in the warmth of heavenly mercy. The sound of grace uplifted most yet strangled one desperate for a miracle.
A stone’s throw along the outer rim, a heartbeat stalled in his shackled breaths as a hooded mage rounded the far corner alley where brick and darkness could hide him. The hymn carried farther than sound should, pressing against his ribs as if the square itself leaned outward, searching.
Elowen Rosemoon’s lips moved in accordance with the incantations in a tome too heavy to hold politely. Every step tarried with the weight of stretched seconds. Left eye half-lidded against the sting of sweat, his gaze found the priestess and her song. What came next was not the theft of voice alone but the heresy of stolen grace. It was only for a moment before the woven words slipped through his teeth.
“I take the breath you do not need, and turn your melody to lead. Let your music die within my throat, a heavy shroud, a muffled coat. I trade your grace for a ghost’s intent; your tune is spent, my sound is sent.”
The change did not arrive loudly.
One,
Then another,
Then, a final.
It was three heartbeats that took her voice.
Liora’s song squelched from within her vocal cords, sequestered from the hearts of humble listeners. Some gasped, others searched each other's faces.
Her focus scattered in all directions, soft nails touched her chin, and a cold shudder pulled at her chest. She tried to sing the recitation of restoration as the crowd exhaled, afraid to commit irreverent noise in the sudden silence.
Echoes inverted into absence. Every step and scrape of the mage’s cloak mummed with abandon as he tore through the alley. Downhill, the cobblestones forgot the crunch of frost as he skipped over odd steps in hastened footfalls bound for the observatory. Behind him, a scant distance away, a metallic whistle peeled the air as uniformed men and spectral hounds on his heels resumed their pursuit.
The alley spilled him into a dim quarter where he grazed corners. Wet sheets on a clothesline slapped him as he scraped a shoulder and almost tripped, above him, the Star Gazer spire rose like a blind eye toward the sky.
A silvered Chronomirror clicked ajar when he jerked it from his breast sleeve. The ticking time-piece shone pale as his bruised thumb traced a triangle on its face. It flickered once. Dials and numbers phased to a public broadcast and sharpened into the high tiered seats of the Edenic Magisterium.
Court bells rang through the apparatus, drowned beyond the mage's radius of silence. Each toll a measured gavel; at the center of a white-marble altar stood the accused. Even through the static glass, his exhale brushed the image of her porcelain semblance and stayed in the delicate dip of her collar where a jade necklace rested proudly. The one he gave her on their anniversary.
She smoothed a lock of hair; shorn of its ornamental braids in procedural disgrace behind a slender ear that tapered to a fine point. Her leaflet earrings outshone the hollow glow of the courtroom.
“The archives burn! By the Ether Warden writ, he is taken dead.” Shadows outpaced the men, their serrated reach snapped at Elowen’s heels.
“Close ranks! Hounds have his print!” the warden-captain's voice cut through the press. From the flank, a clatter of iron boots. Spectral barks bit through the usurped quiet.
The mage lunged into the observatory’s threshold and slammed his weight against the timber as a shade raked the doorframe. He slumped, gasping, clutching his chest. The magical dampening field took hold. Outside, baying familiars and trailing voices faded into muffled echoes toward the lower streets.
He looked down, the silver brass rippled with the condemned's face.
Silk draped her shoulders. Pale, translucent, pronounced penitent before the verdict. The cut was ceremonial and the thinness was cruelty. Her modesty; a clemency revoked.
Her chin lifted anyway. "Ilarya Althea-Verseryis, Envoy of the Edenic Consulate stands accused." The Prosecutorus began. Elven eyes shone like glass heated past its melting point, bright, one degree from shattering.
Elowen's grip went white on the Chronomirror. He shaped the triangle again, harder, as though conviction alone could turn glass into a door. He mouthed her name with his lips. The spell kept it.
Ilarya’s gaze lifted. “Elowen… my beloved.”
Her porcelain mask fractured; a lone pearl of grief traced the curve of her cheek.
“I beg of you, see me through this tribulation.”
Grave-faced elves and heavy robed men of waxed composure murmured with quiet relish. A Magisticiar inclined his head, his voice carried a calm, surgical precision.
“So. This absence is the devotion that purports to defy our Law.”
The Prosecutorus did not deign to look at her as he spoke. “Let the record reflect: the accused invokes a consort who does not answer.”
The Chronomirror creaked under Elowen's grasp. He rested it against the star charts. The gavel hung in miniature over Ilarya's frame, suspended.
Teeth ground against the ticking. The tome slammed open. Pages tore. Ink smeared across his fingers as he flipped through diagrams, ripping a corner through star-lattice, through margins that creased; 'Heed thee well, deviate not. Beware Tohol’Nazutl.' wiped away, ignored.
Where: Coordinates locked.
How: Somatic triggers identified.
His thumb searched the binding crease. Pages flapped like panicked wings.
The temporal anchor, -the When- buried in a fold he'd skipped.
Chalk squealed across stone. The sigil emerged jagged, shaking hands turning clean geometry into desperate scrawl. The glyphs traced the wall like veins of broken mercury, mangled as he forced the final stroke.
The air split.
Not light.
Static.
A grinding like glass dragged over iron. The portal clawed itself agape, resisting, the edges pulsing unstable, hungry.
Heat lashed his face. His palm burned where chalk-dust burrowed into flesh, the sigil branding itself as price.
Behind, the Chronomirror blinked.
The gavel fell.
He dredged for a breath, nearly retching. The inhale a jagged spasm, the exhale a desperate shudder, his lungs finished something he hadn’t started. Stasis kept his bones and blood from remembering motion until the rhythm settled.
Rising, his balance faltered, not from weakness, but from viscosity. Something clung to him. Not enough to pin him. Enough to glue spores to his skin when he moved.
The shadows did not welcome him; they merely waited. Elowen’s knees hit the dirt in a pool of cooling shade cast by a wall of jagged glass and rusted iron. The portal vanished with the crack of a spark. Silence clogged in his ears. He kept his brow against the earth.
"Ilarya." His breath fractured.
He forced the syllables of the North Gate conjuration through his teeth, but the words met only empty air. No snap of reality followed. No scent of temple incense or rain-slicked stone rose.
The air tasted of moist, hostile green and fungal rot. It clung to the back of his throat, warm and heavy.
He shoved himself upward, palms scraping against a pillar of porous stone that crumbled like bone. He looked for cobblestones; he found only black ribs of metal jutting into a canopy of paleotechnic scale. Vines thick as ship moorings engrafted around skeletal towers.
Bile rose in his throat. He looked at his shaking hands, then at the glass teeth of the skyline. He turned from the ruins back toward the alley, his fingers clawing at the empty air where the courtroom should have been.
A flicker of artificial, soul-less light washed over his knuckles from the alley’s mouth. He lurched.
A wall of black crystal and pale metal stood across the street, taller than three fathoms and gate-wide. Its surface was perfectly flat. No seams. No curvature. No evidence of hand or chisel. As the first edge of dawn touched it, the glass ignited without reflection.
The onyx surface bloomed in a sharp, rectangular burst. The beam did not spill. It held acicular edges. It gleamed as the sun climbed, drawing brighter with every breath of morning. No glyph flared. No runes stirred. Nothing moved but the projection itself.
Etherwaves stabilized. A woman’s face filled the surface. Familiar high cheekbones and hair like spun moonlight pulled a whisper from his lips, but the ears did not taper to the elegant points of his betrothed. They were slightly rounded. Untapered, softened by human blood.
A half-breed.
Not his beloved.
The image held the jade at her throat. The setting matched his memory, but the metal caught the green wrong. It did not dull. It did not age. The face smiled. Posed. Then vanished, replaced by a human. Then an orc-featured woman. The transition was seamless.
No cut.
No pause.
The sequence restarted.
All wore the same silks. The same weave. Cloth forbidden to be shared hung identical on each body. Bloodlines that drew steel in his world smiled from the same frame. His world had burned for such unity. This world had collapsed despite it.
Motes slid over his hands. Color shifted with each face. His knuckles, chapped raw by the portal’s discharge, painted bizarre hues that did not belong to dawn. He stood unlit, but the glow reached him anyway. He lifted a hand.
At his temple, among the raven strands, a coarse thread of gray caught the spectrum. It had not been there when he knelt in the observatory and did not bend with the others. It held its shape, brittle against his skin.
Above, the canopy stirred.
A bulk knifed the canopy.
The shape didn't move like a bird. It displaced sky. Orange-red plumage caught the bruised glare of dawn, metallic, aposematic. A warning no one was left to heed. Eyes clustered the edges of its wings. Smaller ones studded its haunches, its tail. They did not blink. They measured. Elowen braced himself against the pillar.
The Dawnwyrm scoured the block once. Twice. Claiming territory.
Then, its maw unhinged. The roar punched his chest with pressure; it thrumbed the marrow and jolted his vision.
It struck his sternum like a fist, rattled his teeth, bleached his vision. Glass exploded from the animated sign. Shards rained. A mutated monkey-rachnid bolted from the rubble and made it three leaps before the monstrosity's head cleaved down. The beak gaped. Backward fangs folded the animal inward. No scream. Just wet compression.
The stillness that followed was worse.
Elowen's breath snagged. He tasted blood where he'd bitten his cheek.
Saliva pooled,
thick,
copper-tasting.
He forced a swallow instead and felt his pulse hammering against his knotted throat.
Above, the predator loomed.
Tracking.
Then it landed on the tower's peak. Its wings furled with boastful precision, each gesture deliberate. It turned, orange plumage catching light, and began. The dance was not graceful.
It was flaunting, a primal display older than the ruins, older than the city. Wings flared. Head canted. Talons scraped concrete in rhythm. Flicking tentacles at its crown swayed, tasting the air for disruption. Elowen tucked himself into cover, lungs burning.
He couldn't move. Any sound, any motion, and it would pivot mid-dive and end him. His mind raced where his body couldn't.
"Bewitched her. Coerced, no. Tricked. Say tricked. She had no choice. I gave her no choice. Let them believe it. Let her live."
The words tasted rancid. She'd once held his face when he tried to lie to himself, when his mother passed –said, "Don't. Not with me."
The pillar crumbled under his weight. He lunged, feet skidding on mossy stone, and crossed into a shaft of sunlight before he understood the mistake.
The creature's head tilted. Every eye along its left wing rotated toward him. Then it swooped.
Elowen threw himself aside as the beak sheared past just close enough that he felt wind pressure graze his neck. He hit the ground shoulder first, and bit down on a scream. His shin scraped concrete, blood welled hot.
The abomination wrenched skyward, wings whipped wide. It perched on the tower's edge, orange feathers blazing in the dawning sun. The tentacles at its crown swayed, tasting his heartbeat through the air. The tome was still in his other hand. Pages crumpled against his ribs.
"Need to die for her."
"Must survive."
His hands shook as he flipped through pages. There, buried in a crease he'd torn through: temporal anchor, bound by breath and star.
No chalk.
No time.
He smeared blood from his knee across the stone. The sigil formed crooked, desperate. His lips moved through the binding phrase, each syllable a risk.
The predator's chest ballooned, then engorged. Chitinous feathers bristled.
The roar came point-blank. His vision went white. Warmth spilled from his ears, wet, immediate. The world tilted. Sound collapsed into a hummed ringing.
The air tore.
The portal snapped open behind him, edges flickering, hungry. He didn't look back.
Then,
–through.
He landed on white marble, knees first. The courtroom spun.
Mouths contorted. Brows knit. Shock... Incredulity, maybe. But he heard nothing, only his own pulse. The assemblage leaned forward in a soundless wave, the world remained a high, distant whine.
Ilarya’s eyes found his. Verdant irises trembled at the contact. Her chin rose a fraction and her lips shaped his name.
Forced upright, blood dripping from his jaw, his hands shook as he raised them, palms out.
The ringing devoured his confession, but he felt the words leave his mouth, each one a vow laid on an altar he would never leave.