Akilliz watched himself walk through the Mistwood.

  That was the only way to describe it. His legs moved, his feet found the path, his body navigated the sapphire mist and the silver trunks with a fluid confidence that had nothing to do with him. Taimon drove and Akilliz rode, a passenger behind eyes that saw the forest in ways no human ever had.

  The Mistwood was alive through dark elven vision. Not just living, the way forests are living, with trees and moss and the slow work of roots. Alive the way a body is alive. He could see the sap moving through the silver trunks, pale blue channels pumping nutrients from root to crown. Could see the mycorrhizal networks beneath the soil, vast webs of fungal thread connecting every tree to every other tree, pulsing with chemical signals that looked like faint light.

  Beautiful. Terrible. Not his to see.

  The forest knew it too. Trees seemed to lean away as he passed, their trunks shifting with slow, deliberate motion, bark creaking. Creatures that had watched from shadows during his outward journey now pressed themselves flat against the ground or retreated into burrows. A fox froze mid-step, stared at him with wide eyes, then bolted so fast it left a thermal streak in his vision. The sapphire mist thinned around him in a perfect circle, the forest's luminescence pulling back from his presence the way oil pulls back from soap.

  The Mistwood wasn't afraid of Akilliz. It was afraid of what was wearing him.

  Then Taimon stopped.

  No warning. No explanation. One moment the demon was in control and the next the strings were cut. Every muscle in Akilliz's body went slack at once, like a marionette dropped from a great height, and he crumpled onto the forest floor.

  Everything hit him.

  The exhaustion came first, a wave so enormous it felt physical, like being buried under wet sand. Then the pain. His right arm throbbed where the wolves had torn it. His right leg burned where teeth had scraped bone. His face ached with the memory of the explosion, the skin tight and tender even though the thimble of Soul's Breath had done its partial work. Underneath all of it, a deeper wrongness. The feeling of his body having been used by something else, muscles sore in ways that didn't match his own movements, joints aching from positions he hadn't chosen to hold.

  He lay on the moss and shook. Not crying. Not yet. Just shaking, his body trying to process days of accumulated damage that Taimon had been holding at bay like a hand over a wound.

  Get up. Brew. Heal. Move.

  Ma's voice. Or maybe his own voice, using Ma's cadence because that was the voice that had always gotten him off the ground.

  The Mistwood dew was everywhere. Sapphire beads hanging from moss and leaf, the forest's gift to anyone who knew to look. He gathered them with trembling hands, pouring them into the one intact vial from his pack. His copper pot was dented but functional. His supplies were scattered but not gone. Vyr'elthar. Feverfew. A pinch of chamomile, the last of it.

  The brewing was quick and rough. No careful workstation on stable rock. No meticulous setup. Just a boy on the forest floor, heating dew over a small fire he built from dry moss and fallen branches, humming Ma's three note tune through cracked lips while the liquid shifted from pale blue to something close enough to right. Not his best work and certainly not perfect. The stars didn't flicker in the depths the way they did when the brew was true.

  But it was Soul's Breath. And he drank the whole thing.

  The healing came fast and thorough. Wolf bites closing, torn muscle knitting, burned skin smoothing to pink and then to normal. The tightness across his face eased. His right leg straightened, the calf muscle whole again. His right arm, shoulder to fingertips, restored.

  He sat up. Breathed. Flexed his hands.

  The right one worked perfectly. Clean and healed and human, the skin pale and unmarked from wrist to fingertips. He turned it over.

  There. In the center of his palm. Thalindra's mark. A faint circle, barely visible in normal light, but through the dark elf eyes it glowed with a soft white luminescence that he'd not been able to see before. The symbol the High Judiciar marked him with, a sign that Luminael was still watching him.

  The corruption stopped at its edge.

  He could see it clearly now. The gray skin and black veins that covered his left side, his chest, and his neck, had been spreading like a tide across the map of his body. The corruption lapped at its border the way water laps at a seawall. Pressing. Testing. Unable to cross the threshold of his right arm.

  Thalindra's mark was holding.

  The woman who had watched him with calculating eyes since the day he arrived, her mark was the only thing standing between the corruption and the last clean part of him. His right arm. His brewing hand. The hand that had made Soul's Breath on a volcanic mountain without any demon's help.

  A sound came out of him. Not quite a sob. Something rawer, more fundamental, the noise a person makes when they discover that the thing protecting them was put there by someone they were afraid of.

  He pressed his right palm to his face and held it there and shook for a while.

  Then he got up.

  She found him as he gathered his pack.

  A flash of purple light between the silver trunks, darting fast, the way she always moved when she was excited. Aura burst from the canopy in a spiral of opalescent shimmer, her tiny form radiating warmth and joy, wings humming with a frequency that tickled the edge of hearing. She'd felt him through the ring. Felt his distress, his proximity, his return. And she'd come.

  She flew straight at him, trilling, her violet glow brightening with each wingbeat.

  Then she stopped.

  Three feet away. Hovering. Her opalescent eyes went wide. The black streak in her left wing, the one he'd given her when his tainted healing saved her life and marked her forever, pulsed hard. She flinched. Her whole body contracted like she'd been stung.

  "Aki..."

  The word entered mind to mind, faint and broken, the way her speech always was when she tried to bridge the gap between fae thought and human language. But this time the brokenness wasn't the communication. It was her.

  She could feel what he'd become. The corruption wasn't just visible to fae. It was a presence, a weight, a wrongness that pressed against her the way the Mistwood's mist had pressed away from his body. Being near him hurt her. The black vein in her wing throbbed in sympathy with the black veins under his skin, and each throb made her wince.

  "Different," she whispered into his mind. "Aki... so much dark. So much..."

  She couldn't finish. Her glow dimmed. Her wings slowed. She drifted backward, not by choice but by instinct, the way your hand pulls back from a hot surface before your brain decides to move it.

  He reached out his right hand. The clean one. The one Thalindra's mark protected.

  "Aura. I'm still here. I'm still me."

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  She looked at his hand. Looked at his eyes. The red tint in them that hadn't been there before. The subtle wrongness in his face, the sharpened features, the ear tips more pointed than any human's should be.

  Her tiny face crumpled. A sound came from her that wasn't words, wasn't speech, just pure fae grief transmitted directly into his mind like a bell struck too hard. She turned and flew, not fast, not fleeing, just retreating with the wounded slowness of something whose heart was breaking.

  He stood there with his hand out, reaching for a friend who couldn't bear to touch him.

  After a moment he lowered it. Shouldered his pack. Started walking.

  A hundred yards later, he looked back.

  Purple light. Faint. Distant. Moving through the trees on a parallel path, too far to touch, too loyal to leave. It broke his heart.

  He faced forward and kept walking.

  The stream was cold enough to make him gasp. He scrubbed his face, his hands, washed the dried blood from his right arm and the volcanic ash from his hair. His reflection stared up from the water and he looked away before the dark elf eyes could stare back.

  Cloak up. Collar high. Gloves on. Head down.

  Luminael's towers appeared through the Mistwood's edge, white stone catching the afternoon light. The walk from the tree line to the gate took twenty minutes and every step felt like a performance. Normal stride. Relaxed pace. Just a student coming back from an expedition. Nothing unusual. Nothing wrong.

  The guards at the gate glanced at him. One made a note on a ledger. Neither stopped him.

  Inside the walls, the city was already preparing for tomorrow. Banners hung from archways, silver and gold cloth catching the breeze. Students carried supplies between buildings. The air hummed with anticipation and purpose, the special energy that filled Luminael before a major celebration.

  Akilliz kept his head down and walked.

  The new eyes made it hard. Everything was too much. He could see the heat signatures of people through walls, warm orange shapes moving inside buildings. Could see the magical residue hanging over Luminael like fine dust, the accumulated centuries of elven enchantment visible as a faint shimmering lattice that overlay every surface. The wards on the gates pulsed with a slow rhythm. The academy's towers glowed from within, their stones saturated with protective magic that his old eyes had never detected.

  Twice his head started to turn toward something, his neck rotating without his permission. Both times he caught it, fought it back, forced his gaze forward. Taimon's instincts were still threaded through his muscles. The demon wasn't driving but his fingerprints were everywhere, habits of attention and movement that didn't belong to Akilliz, embedded in the body's memory like a song you can't stop humming.

  He reached the workshop door and pushed it open.

  Sylvara looked up from her bench. Her expression went through three changes in rapid succession. Surprise, concern, and something sharper. Assessment.

  "By the Nine, young light. You look like the mountain chewed you up and spat you out."

  "It tried."

  He crossed the workshop on legs that were starting to wobble. Set the Dragon's Breath specimen on her workbench. The sealed vial, dark glass, the plant glowing faintly red inside.

  Sylvara picked it up. Held it to the light. Rotated it slowly.

  Her hands stilled.

  The cut. He could see her examining it through the dark glass. Clean. No char. No volatility scarring. No evidence of the desperate three second race that every Dragon's Breath harvest required. The stem looked like it had been severed at leisure, in perfect conditions, by someone who had all the time in the world.

  She looked at him. Her eyes were careful.

  "Remarkable specimen," she said. "Intact. Potent. The cut is..." She paused, choosing her word. "Unusual."

  He said nothing.

  She set the vial down. "Your friends have been checking every few hours since yesterday. I was supposed to send word when you returned. I gave them your letters." She studied him again, her gaze lingering on details he was trying to hide. The way he held his left side. The slight tilt of his head. Something about his eyes that made her brow furrow for just a moment before she smoothed it away. "But I think what you need right now is sleep, not visitors."

  "The offering," he started. "The Festival is—"

  "Tomorrow. I know. And a raw specimen isn't an offering." She came around the bench and took his arm. The right one. Her grip was firm and warm and not unkind. "Sleep first. Brew after. You're no good to anyone swaying on your feet."

  His legs chose that moment to prove her point. The wobble became a buckle and he sagged sideways. She caught him, surprisingly strong for her frame, and braced him against her shoulder.

  "Easy, my sprout. I've got you."

  She guided him out of the workshop and up the stairs to his room. Her arm around his back, his weight against her side, their footsteps echoing in the quiet tower. She didn't ask about the mountain. Didn't press about the harvest or his reddened eyes. Just walked with him in silence, steady and patient, the way you walk with someone who's been carrying too much for too long.

  His room was dim and cool. She eased him onto the bed. Pulled the blanket up. Her hand rested on his forehead for a moment, checking for fever. A gesture so maternal it made his throat close.

  "Sleep," she said.

  He was gone before the door clicked shut.

  Voices pulled him back.

  "—could have been killed up there alone and we wouldn't have even known—"

  "Kael, keep your voice down, he's—"

  "No, I won't keep my voice down. He snuck out without telling us, went up a volcanic mountain by himself, and came back looking like—"

  "Like what?" Akilliz's voice came out rough and thin. He opened his eyes. Late afternoon light angled through the window. Lirien sat at the foot of his bed, her beautiful auburn hair loose, expression caught between relief and something fragile. Kael stood by the door, arms crossed, his jaw set the way it set when he was angry because he'd been scared.

  "Like death warmed over," Kael said. "Your skin's the wrong color. Your ears are—" He stopped. Squinted. "Have your ears always been that...?"

  "Mountain herbs." The lie came easy. Too easy. "Some of them have side effects. Temporary."

  Kael studied him with the suspicious look of someone who didn't believe a word but didn't have enough evidence to push. Lirien said nothing. Her eyes moved over his face, his hands, the subtle changes that sleep hadn't erased. She was cataloguing. Filing. She didn't challenge the lie either. But she didn't believe it.

  "You should have told us," Kael said. Quieter now. The anger bleeding out, leaving something softer underneath. "We would have come."

  "I know."

  "Then why didn't you ask?"

  Because Taimon's corruption would have been harder to hide for two days on a mountain. Because the acceleration potions would have raised questions. Because the sulfur gas might have killed them. Because the wolves definitely would have.

  "It was something I needed to do alone."

  Kael held his gaze for a long moment. Then he uncrossed his arms. Crossed the room. Clapped Akilliz's shoulder with a grip that was half affection and half warning.

  "Rest tonight. Third bell tomorrow, the whole city celebrates. You're not missing it." He glanced at Lirien. Held the look a beat too long. Then left, pulling the door shut behind him with exaggerated care.

  The room went quiet.

  Lirien moved from the foot of the bed to the chair beside it. She didn't speak. Just reached out and took his right hand. The clean one. Her fingers laced through his, warm and steady, and her thumb traced the edge of his palm where Thalindra's mark sat invisible beneath her touch.

  She didn't know what the mark was. Didn't know it was the only thing keeping the corruption from taking his last good hand. She just held it because it was his hand and she wanted to hold it.

  "I was scared," she said. Quiet. Looking at their interlaced fingers instead of his face. "When you didn't come back yesterday. I thought..."

  She didn't finish. Didn't need to.

  He squeezed her hand. Wanted to tell her everything. The mountain. The explosion. The wolves. The moment he'd given Taimon everything because the alternative was dying on volcanic rock with her name still warm in his mouth. Wanted to tell her that the hand she was holding was the last part of him that was still his, and that he was afraid the day he couldn't feel her fingers anymore was coming soon.

  He didn't say any of it. Just held on. And drifted.

  Sylvara's voice came from the doorway, soft enough not to startle. "He needs sleep more than company, child."

  Lirien's fingers tightened for a moment. Then released. He felt her stand. Felt her lean down. Her lips brushed his forehead, light as Aura's wing, and then she was gone and the door closed and he was alone in the dark.

  Sleep took him like a mercy.

  Dreamless. Black. Empty. The first true rest in days, his body finally allowed to shut down without chemical walls or demonic occupation holding the machinery in motion. Just silence and darkness and the slow work of healing that happens when a body is finally left alone.

  It lasted four hours.

  A hand on his shoulder. Firm. Insistent.

  He opened his eyes to candlelight and Sylvara's face. She looked like she hadn't slept either. Her hair was loose, her expression stripped of its usual careful composure. On his bedside table, she'd placed a small bottle. He recognized it before his brain fully woke.

  Acceleration.

  "The Festival is approaching fast," she said. "Your offering isn't brewed. The specimen is remarkable but a raw plant in a vial is not going to impress anyone, least of all the Goddess." She straightened. "You have tonight. The workshop is yours. Everything you need is laid out."

  She paused. Studied him in the candlelight. Whatever she saw in his face, in his eyes, she chose not to name.

  "Can you do this, Akilliz?"

  He looked at the acceleration potion. The substance that had kept him awake for days. That had masked the sulfur gas until he nearly died. That had suppressed every warning signal his body sent because that's what it was designed to do. The thing keeping him going was also the thing that was going to kill him.

  But the Festival was tomorrow. And the Dragon's Breath had to be drinkable.

  He picked up the bottle.

  "I can do this."

  Sylvara nodded once. Turned to leave. Stopped at the door.

  "Your mother would be proud of you," she said. "Whatever happened on that mountain."

  Then she was gone. And Akilliz was alone with a demon in his chest and a potion in his hand and one night to do the impossible.

  He drank.