Ruin is my birthright.
I stand on the shore of a small pond, waters the glory of Malkiel has rendered Holy, pawing at my face with a hand inked red by carnage.
There is a rock in my hand.
"Stop!" little Enna screams in fear and fury.
My cousins regard me, a cluster of terrified children crouching about Septimus's prone form. My heart holds only indifference, bottomless indifference. Yet my lips quicken into a bestial smile.
There is a rock in my hand.
They take umbrage at my display, lose honeyed lamentations into the endless sky. If brutality is all they know, if that is all they understand then I will make them wail for the torment of their battered bodies.
I step forward.
They cringe back and keen, but it is too late.
It will always be too late.
My wrath falls upon them, a hard stone clenched in a little hand. I smash teeth out of maws, replace pride with obedience, transform once arrogant fools into weeping sissies.
There is a rock … in my little hand
I can feel it grow sleek with crimson riverlets, a gap along what can no longer be perceived, an absence in being itself. A part of me is gone.
There is a rock where my innocence should be.
I snarl, this knowledge cutting through. Tears spill down my cheeks. Fiery distortions pulse about the corners of my eyes. Blood spews from parted flesh.
Weakness is their damnation.
There is a…
Memories retreat like mist and smoke into porous earth.
Something inside me remains wounded. Raw. I do not look at it.
I wake with a sharp gasp, my body heavy against stone that is cold and damp beneath me. The air bites at my skin as I blink, waiting for the chamber to bleed into focus.
This room is larger than the others, cube-shaped, its surfaces jagged and uneven, etched with runes that pulse faintly in the dim light. Shadows move along the walls when I do not, creating the illusion of something watching.
A sharp whistle cuts through the silence.
I lurch upright, my eyes finding Binah at the chamber's center, her pale figure taut and focused. A blade floats before her, twisting and spinning as runes dance along its length in bursts of silver and crimson.
The whistling intensifies as the blade hurtles toward her.
Binah raises her hands, her fingers moving in patterns that manipulate something I cannot see. The blade slows mid-flight, jerking erratically as if caught in an invisible web, and its hum deepens into a growl that vibrates through the stone beneath my boots.
She steps to the side. Her fingers twitch, and the blade redirects, lunging past her shoulder by inches.
Whatever she is doing, the weapon does not like it.
The blade twists violently, breaks free, and its runes flare brighter.
It spins toward me.
The edge streaks toward my chest, and I throw myself to the ground as the blade passes inches above me, sparks scattering when it slams into stone. It rises again, its tip angling toward me like something hunting.
"Binah."
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She does not react, but her arms sweep upward, fingers moving in patterns too quick to follow. The blade jerks mid-air, diverted just enough for me to roll clear.
I stumble to my feet as the blade whistles past again. I twist, but the edge grazes my side.
My skin splits, and blood wells from the cut before the burning follows a breath later.
Binah continues fighting the weapon, pulling it away from me again and again with sharp, deliberate movements. But I see the tremor in her hands, the way each deflection costs her more than the last.
She cannot keep this up.
The blade lunges again, and this time her hold falters. The weapon streaks toward me, faster and more erratic than before.
My body reacts without thought.
My arms rise in a pattern I did not choose, and my feet shift into a stance I have not used in days. Hours? The movements come from somewhere deeper than conscious memory, muscle and bone remembering what my mind tried to bury.
Mother's courtyard. Dawn light. Four years old.
No. Not now.
The blade's edge grazes my shoulder, another line of fire across my skin, but I force myself to breathe. Inhale, exhale. Each breath anchoring the next step in a pattern that feels both foreign and intimately familiar.
The weapon lunges. I twist away, and the blade misses by a hair's breadth.
My arms rise in sweeping arcs as my feet pivot, and the movements come faster now, smoother, as if my body remembers what my mind buried beneath hours of refusing to think about Mother's courtyard and her patient hands guiding mine through forms I swore I would never forget.
Binah pulls the blade back with a sharp flick of her fingers. A moment's reprieve. She glances at me, her violet eyes narrowing as if assessing something beyond my physical performance.
Then she steps back, and her hands drop to her sides.
The blade lunges again.
This time I am alone.
The weapon moves like something alive, its strikes relentless and precise, but my body responds in kind as each movement flows seamlessly into the next. The pain in my limbs fades into background noise, becoming just another element in the pattern I am weaving with flesh and bone.
The blade hums, and my breath matches its rhythm without conscious thought.
For a moment, the strikes become predictable. My feet glide across stone as my arms slice through air, and the blade and I move together, a pattern within a pattern, a dance that feels like something I was born knowing.
The courtyard surfaces again. Unbidden. Unwelcome.
"Feel it, Janus. Rhythm inside you."
Mother's voice. Mother's hands guiding mine through the motion.
I lose focus for a breath.
The blade vanishes.
A sharp crack of displaced air, and the weapon reappears inches from my face, its edge streaking toward me with renewed fury.
The calm shatters. I stumble back as the blade's strikes become erratic, disappearing and reappearing in unpredictable bursts that I can no longer track or predict.
Binah's threads flicker faintly in the air between us. Her hands rise to intercept, but the blade resists her pull more fiercely than before, as if something in my loss of control has awakened its own fury.
I extend a hand, not knowing what I intend, only that something must change.
Something detaches from the torq at my throat. A string. A root. Something that writhes in the air between us like a living thing seeking connection.
It reaches for the blade.
The connection is immediate.
The inside of my forehead burns with white-hot light that pulses behind my eyes, and words form against the dark void of my closed lids, sharp and clear and utterly foreign:
Unbound Skathrith. Do you wish to bond?
The question sears itself into my awareness, demanding an answer that feels both inevitable and terrifying.
I hear only the hum of the blade, the slow rattle of chains somewhere overhead, and the pounding of my heart against my ribs.
Bond. With this thing.
The weapon jerks in mid-air, its edge gleaming as it thrashes against the root's pull with a violence that speaks of sentience, of will. My head throbs, and the strain splits through my skull like an axe driven through ice.
Binah steps closer, her fingers twitching as her threads reinforce my hold, adding her strength to mine in this strange contest of wills.
"Bond."
I growl the word through clenched teeth, forcing it past the pain, past the doubt, past every instinct that screams this is wrong.
The chamber stills.
The blade vibrates once, and a high-pitched whine pierces the air.
Then everything shifts.
The string ignites with black flame and fuses into the runes along the Skathrith's length as light erupts, flooding the chamber with blinding radiance that makes me want to look away but I cannot.
The Skathrith dissolves, dissolves into streams of liquid light that rush toward me with terrible purpose.
I stumble back. The light does not stop.
It strikes my chest, cold and sharp, wrong in ways I have no words for. The sensation is not pain but something deeper, like ice water poured directly into my veins and spreading with deliberate intent.
The streams burrow beneath my skin.
I can feel them spreading through muscle, through bone, tracing pathways that should not exist. The weapon's hum resonates inside me now, vibrating against the cage of my ribs like something trying to make itself at home.
My knees buckle. I try to speak but no words come.
The presence inside me shifts. Alien and vast. Incomprehensible. It brushes against something I did not know I had, a space carved hollow behind my sternum that I never knew existed.
It fills the emptiness.
I gasp as the chamber blurs, every detail sharpening and fracturing simultaneously. I see too much, feel too much. The cold weight of stone beneath my boots. The faint pulse of Binah's threads. The vibration of air itself.
The Skathrith continues rising through me.
I feel it climb my spine, vertebra by vertebra, each point of contact burning with a cold that has nothing to do with temperature. My vision splits, and I see the chamber and something else overlapping, layered, impossible to reconcile.
The presence reaches my skull.
Pressure builds behind my eyes, behind my forehead, and the hum becomes a roar that drowns out thought, drowns out self, drowns out everything except the certainty that something is about to break through.
I try to breathe. Cannot. Try to move. Cannot.
The Skathrith erupts from the crown of my head.
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