The crack in the wall pulses with purpose now, no longer a simple fracture in stone but something that breathes and responds. Red liquid seeps faster, pooling on stone that should absorb moisture but instead repels it, creating a surface that wrinkles and shifts with deliberate movement. The substance carries intention I can sense but not name.
The Skathrith recognizes it.
Through our fractured bond, I taste the weapon's hunger, not for flesh or blood or the simple violence of cutting. For completion. For the missing piece that will transform potential into actuality.
I take a step toward the pool, drawn by something deeper than curiosity.
Binah's hand settles on my shoulder.
Solid.
Real.
The weight carries meaning I cannot name, though it feels like both confidence and warning woven together until the two become indistinguishable. Her touch anchors me to the present moment, to the stone beneath my feet and the choice I have not yet made.
I kneel before the crack, feeling the stone's chill seep through my knees, and study the liquid pooling at my feet. It is darker than blood, thicker, catching the Skathrith's pale light and throwing back colors that shift through spectrums I lack words to describe. The surface moves with a languid purpose that suggests awareness, as if the substance knows I am here and has been waiting.
The habit of observation surfaces one final time before everything changes. Viscosity suggests oil. Movement pattern indicates sentience or something that mimics it closely enough that the distinction carries no practical weight. My mind catalogs these details with the clinical precision Mother instilled, trying to impose order on something that resists categorization.
The analysis dies before completion.
Another trial. Another crucible designed to burn away weakness and forge what remains into something harder, sharper, capable of cutting through the world's resistance. The pattern has become familiar.
My body catalogues its damages without prompting, each injury a line item in an accounting I did not request but cannot ignore. Ribs still tender from the impact of tossed stones. Bones still knitting from Binah's violent training, the fractures she inflicted to teach lessons I am only beginning to understand. Hollow places in my chest where the baptism carved out certainty and replaced it with questions I cannot answer. The ghost-chick's fall plays behind my eyes when I blink, a reminder that each trial takes its portion and some costs cannot be calculated until they are already paid.
The wise choice would be rest, would be preparation, would be allowing my body time to recover before demanding more of it than it can reasonably give. The Mere trains warriors, not martyrs. Strategy over stubbornness. Patience over pride. These principles have been drilled into me until they surface automatically, muscle memory of the mind.
Except the Skathrith hums in my chest with a patience that feels infinite, waiting with the certainty of something that knows how this story ends, that has perhaps always known, that recognizes the shape of what is coming before I do.
And I know, with a certainty that bypasses thought and settles directly into bone, that rest changes nothing essential. The liquid does not care whether I am whole or broken when I approach it. The trial does not adjust its difficulty to match my readiness or lack thereof. These forces simply exist, indifferent to my preparation or my wounds.
I can walk away from this chamber and the liquid pooling on stone, can return to the surface and tell myself that wisdom guided my choice, that survival sometimes means knowing when to retreat. Mother would call it wisdom, would say that discretion preserves what recklessness destroys, would remind me that the dead prove nothing except their own mortality. Cyra would call it survival, would point to my damaged body and ask what purpose is served by breaking what is already fractured.
I would call it exactly what it is.
Defeat.
The kind that comes from beating yourself. From choosing preservation over transformation because transformation might cost more than you can pay. From deciding that safety matters more than becoming something greater than what you are.
I have already paid the cost of being too Netniem for Malkiel. Too Malkiel for anywhere else. Too weak to matter in the eyes of those who judge strength by lineage and accomplishment. Too strange to ignore.
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What is one more price?
The Skathrith's hum shifts in response to something it senses before I consciously acknowledge it, dropping lower, settling into a frequency that feels like recognition. The weapon knows the choice before I make it. Knows what I will do because perhaps there was never truly a choice at all, only the illusion of one painted over inevitability.
My hand moves.
I extend it toward the pooling red.
The liquid surges upward.
No hesitation. No waiting for contact. It knows I am here.
The substance wraps around my fingers with purpose, not hot or cold—wrong. The wrongness races up my forearm before I can pull back.
Cannot pull back.
My hand is gone. Consumed by red that pulses in time with my heartbeat. The rhythm matches perfectly. Two becomes one.
The liquid crawls beneath my skin.
I feel it moving. Through veins that were not meant to carry this. The sensation is intimate. Violating. As if something is rewriting the architecture of my flesh from the inside, replacing what I was with what I am becoming.
My free hand claws stone. Nails split. The scraping sound echoes through the chamber.
The Skathrith's light flares.
Brighter. The pale glow becomes searing. White edged with violet. The chamber walls throw back shadows that writhe and multiply.
Heat spreads across my chest.
My spine arches. Vertebrae crack in sequence. One. Two. Three. Each pop a small death. Each reformation a resurrection I did not ask for.
The scream builds in my throat.
No. I am the stronger.
The thought fractures as the liquid reaches my shoulder. My elbow. My chest.
For one heartbeat, the advance pauses. The red liquid settles beneath my skin as if finding its place, as if this might be the extent of the transformation, as if I might endure this and remain myself.
Something inside me breaks, a wall I built long ago, the barrier between what I am and what I refuse to become.
The red finds the gap.
The scream tears free.
My ribs snap. The sound is wet. Final. They reform harder. Denser. Each breath cuts like broken glass.
The Skathrith's light intensifies. The chamber dissolves into white. The runes blaze. Binah splits into three figures. Six. Nine. All watching with violet eyes that hold no pity.
Mother's eyes.
The thought arrives unbidden. Unwelcome.
The liquid reaches my throat, and copper floods my mouth—ash, something older than the Mere, older than Malkiel. The taste carries memory that is not mine. Ancient. Vast. Belonging to something that wore flesh differently or perhaps never wore it at all.
I see a throne.
It sits folded into dimensions that refuse to align with the three I know. Angles that exist sideways to reality itself. Hands lift a crown woven from light that bends without breaking. Too many fingers, or perhaps the right number for hands I do not recognize. The crown settles upon a head I cannot see clearly, though I know with bone-deep certainty that I have seen this moment before, will see it again, am seeing it now across a gulf of time that means nothing to whatever sits upon that impossible seat.
My left femur cracks.
The vision shatters. Only pain remains. The bone grinds against itself. Reforms. My leg convulses with spasms I cannot control.
The right leg follows.
Terror rises like flood water. Helplessness. The certainty that I am being unmade.
Let go. Something that might be death whispers in a voice like wind through empty rooms. Relax. Become nothing.
I do not want to become that.
I want to survive.
Binah's hands press against my temples. Cool marble against burning skin. The only anchor to now. To real. To the chamber that exists outside this transformation.
The liquid reaches my skull.
Pressure builds behind my eyes, as if something vast is folding itself into a space designed for one heartbeat, one breath, one mind.
The Skathrith's song changes, shifts into a frequency that matches something inside me. A resonance I did not know I carried until this moment when weapon and wielder cease to be separate things occupying the same space.
One.
The word resonates through bone and blood and the space where I once ended and the weapon began. Except there is no ending now. No beginning. Only the continuous present of a bond that was always inevitable, always waiting to complete itself.
My vision fractures. I see myself kneeling. See Binah holding my head. See the Skathrith's light pouring into my chest like liquid starfire.
All at once. All separate. All converging.
The transformation peaks.
Every nerve ignites. The pain transcends endurance. Transcends containment.
Love. Rage. Grief. The hollow where Mother should stand. The weight of Grandmother's accusations. Cyra's fear disguised as preparation. The ghost-chick falling into nothing.
All of it.
All at once.
One.
Then silence.
The liquid withdraws, sinking deeper, becoming part of me instead of separate from me.
The Skathrith settles above. A weight that hangs as a moon or a sun. A presence that feels both alien and inevitable.
The bond completes.
Binah's hands release. She steps back. Her form resolves into one.
I lie on stone that is no longer cold. My body trembles. Something darker than sweat runs down my face. I taste iron and ash.
The chamber holds its breath.
I raise my hand. Fingers shake. The skin looks the same but I know better. Can never unknow what happened here.
The Skathrith hums inside my chest. Quiet now. Patient.
Waiting.
I try to stand.
My legs refuse. I sink back down, too hollow to fight gravity.
Binah watches. Neither approval nor disappointment crosses her pale features. Only observation.
I close my eyes.
The Skathrith's light dims, no longer searing but settling into a steady glow that pulses in time with my heartbeat. My heartbeat, singular, though I feel the weapon's presence as clearly as my own pulse. The chamber resolves into stillness. The runes fade to embers. Binah's violet eyes become the only point of focus in a world gone soft at the edges.
No longer two hearts beating.
One.
The thought should bring triumph or terror, but I am too hollow for either. Victory. Surrender. The distinction blurs as darkness rises like water filling a space I no longer have the strength to resist, and I let it come, let it take me under, because I have already survived the worst transformation I will ever endure.
Or so I tell myself as consciousness fades.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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Ablations (ongoing)