White-hot light seared Seris’s mind. Pain, sharp, alien, and intimate, throbbed in every nerve. She screamed, but it was not her own voice. It was layered, overlapping, mingling with something deeper, colder, something that had not felt fear in centuries.

  And then the light vanished.

  Seris lay on the cracked cobblestones of the alley, trembling, her lungs burning as if she had run for days. Her palms scraped against stone dust; the scroll she had used smoldered at her side, consumed by the ritual. The city groaned around her. Collapsed roofs, smoke curling into a bruised sky, distant cries of the dying.

  The Bone Harrower.

  He stood just beyond the alley’s shadow. Just… watching. The faint pulse of necrotic energy radiated off him like a tide, and Seris could feel it dragging at her chest, threading itself into her heartbeat.

  The mask was closer now, as if he had stepped through her terror to peer inside her soul. She could almost - almost - sense something human beneath it. Something buried.

  His gaze locked on her the moment she moved.

  She felt the reaction cut through her mind like a hooked blade. Her head spun. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. She wanted to vanish.

  But she couldn’t.

  Something was inside her. A feeling that belonged to him.

  Not curiosity, but recognition. And fury.

  The pressure in her skull sharpened, fracturing like ice beneath weight.

  What have you—

  What have you bound me to?

  Her stomach twisted. Bound? She could feel the pull of the ritual like chains coiling around her soul, intertwining with his. It was not just magic, it was life, flesh, thought. She could not separate herself from him.

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  “I—I didn’t bind—I don’t even know what the ritual—” she stammered, choking on the words.

  The Harrower’s armour groaned, necrotic energy igniting across the plates like veins of fire. The stone at his feet cracked and blackened.

  The next thought was nothing like a voice. It was a verdict.

  You reached for power you did not understand. And now you have chained something you cannot control.

  It felt like a blow to the stomach.

  The Legion beyond the alley hesitated, their hollow eyes flickering toward their master, awaiting command that did not come. The Harrower took one step forward.

  One step.

  And Seris felt that step inside her chest, a jolt that rattled her ribs as though her heart had moved in response to his stride. She scrambled backward, fingers digging into ash—

  —and the space where he stood emptied.

  He was suddenly behind her.

  A clawed, bone-encrusted hand reached toward her shoulder, hovering inches from her skin before jerking back violently, as if the bond itself had burned him. The energy surged like a storm. She felt the connection deepen; panic mixed with something else: trembling and electric.

  The bond convulsed.

  Her vision split, half clinging to the broken alley, half dragged into a flood of memories not her own. She sensed his stride over shattered stone, the weight of immense armour crushing skulls beneath it. She felt the echo of blows shattering against his shoulder, the sting of magic that had tried - and failed - to stop him.

  Her fingers curled against the stone as the hunger surged through her, cold and endless.

  Not hunger for food. Not even hunger for life. A hunger for what he had lost.

  Kingdoms. Armies. Obedience. Fear.

  And then the memories inverted, her terror pulsing through the bond, reflecting back in a way that made her flinch. He tasted it. Her guilt. Her desperation. The bright spark of defiance that had driven her to finish the ritual.

  His response was immediate and violent.

  The fury pressed against her thoughts like a crushing fist.

  Her voice trembled. “I… don’t know how to undo it.”

  He returned in front of her and went utterly still. The burning ruins reflected across the bone mask, rendering him less a man and more a shadow carved from nightmare.

  Then learn.

  Her heart sank before the rest followed.

  Because if she couldn’t break this chain… he would.

  Wind swept cinders across the alley as his presence withdrew just enough for her to breathe.The bond held them both like wire drawn through flesh.

  Seris pressed a shaking hand to her sternum, feeling the connection pulse with a life not her own.

  She had not summoned a guardian. She had not summoned an ally.

  She had shackled herself to a monster who wanted her dead.