Lord Vine sat on his throne, the rage pouring off him and filling the dark room.
Lady in Dark paced in front of him, her cloak tracing slow arcs across the stone floor.
"You should have killed him." His voice was low enough that it required attention to hear. "When you had him. When he was sick and depleted and helpless. You should have ended it there."
She said nothing. Because she knew he was right.
The silence stretched until he chose to fill it.
"We move up the schedule."
"Things aren't ready," she said.
"Nothing will be ready if we wait." The quiet in his voice developed an edge. "He's already killed thousands. Every hybrid he removes from the capital reduces the abyssal concentration. Every day we wait, he narrows the window further."
His cold eyes moved to her. "If we give him enough ti, he'll clear the entire city."
"We could use another location," Lady in Dark said. "Another city with sufficient—"
"There is no other city." The words landed flat and final. "The capital has been accumulating this density for months. What we need exists here and nowhere else in sufficient quantity. We use it now or we lose it."
Silence filled the hall again.
Lady in Dark stopped pacing.
She exhaled once, slowly, through her nose.
"I'll retrieve the abyssal heart," she said. "The hatred should be concentrated enough by now."
Lord Vine looked at her for a mont. Then he nodded.
"Good," he said.
He watched her turn and walk out of the hall until the darkness swallowed her entirely.
***
The infirmary was quiet, just as it had been for weeks now.
Faye sat in the chair beside Cecilia's bed, her elbow on the armrest, her chin resting in her palm.
The worry on her face had beco familiar enough that she wasn't sure she had other expressions these days.
She reached out and cast the diagnostic spell for what felt like the hundredth ti this week, watching the light move across Cecilia's body.
A second later, the light returned with the sa result. The sa readings she'd been seeing from the first ti she'd cast the spell.
Cecilia was in great physical health.
She exhaled and leaned back.
Then a thin red line appeared across her neck without any warning.
Her eyes widened, before her head severed from her neck, falling to the floor. Her body followed a mont later, the chair tipping sideways with a slow, almost gentle motion.
Lady in Dark stepped over the body without looking at it and stopped at the bedside.
She looked at Cecilia for a mont, her head tilting slightly, her senses moving inwards through the barrier she'd placed there weeks ago, reading what had accumulated inside it.
The hatred had been building in the dark, cycling through the loop she had constructed, compressing with each repetition into sothing denser and more refined.
She made a small sound. "Barely passable," she said, to no one.
She reached into her robes and produced the teleportation device she'd been given, a small thing, unremarkable in appearance, and closed her fist around it.
The chanism inside it cracked as her grip tightened, and then the energy released, consuming them both in a wash of light that left the infirmary empty except for Faye's body and the overturned chair.
An instant later, they appeared in a dark room.
A giant ritual circle covered most of the floor, with different lines and runes crisscrossing the diagrams.
Lady in Dark's telekinesis moved imdiately, lifting Cecilia from where she had arrived and carrying her to the center of the largest circle, setting her down with care.
She straightened and slowly inhaled.
The abyssal energy was everywhere, saturating the air of the capital at a concentration that months of careful preparation had built towards.
She could feel it in every inhale, dense and present, exactly what she needed for what ca next.
She reached into her robes again.
The two identical golden daggers ca out together, one in each hand, their blades catching the faint light in the room and throwing it back warr than it had arrived. The keys, both of them, finally together.
She held them for a mont, feeling their weight.
At her signal, the Reunifiers that had been standing at the edge of the room stepped forward to the outer ring of the circle without hesitation, and one by one drove blades into their own hearts.
Their expressions didn't even change, and so had smiles on their faces, having made this decision long before tonight.
They believed they would be among the first to reunify with their god, the Sleeper Beneath.
Their corpses slumped forward and the blood ca, spreading into the channels carved into the stone, following the lines of the ritual circle.
The circle ignited, a deep red light spreading from the point of first contact through every carved line until the entire pattern was alive and pulsing beneath Cecilia's body.
Lady in Dark began to chant.
The mana and abyssal energy responded to each other, mixing in the air above the circle, wind coming from no visible source and building as the chant built.
Her voice reached its peak and she raised one of the golden daggers, the point angled downward towards Cecilia's chest.
She stabbed, but before the knife could tear into flesh, a hand caught her wrist.
Ice spread from the point of contact, crawling up her hand and across her forearm in rapid branching lines, the cold imdiate and intent.
"We finally et," said the voice beside her, "Lady in Dark."
She stopped. Then, slowly, the surprise resolved into sothing warr. She chuckled, the sound genuine.
"Arlo Kael," she said. "The Oracle of Calot."
Arlo drove a shard of ice forward in an attack, but her telekinesis hit before it connected.
He erected a wall of ice in that sa instant, the wall stopping his montum in place. Instead of flying back from the force, he simply slamd his back into the ice, which cracked.
He pushed off it imdiately, driving forward, and his foot found her before she had fully reset, the kick connecting with enough force to send her stumbling back two steps.
He closed the distance.
She commandeered the scattered shards of ice he'd left behind, sending it flying at him.
He moved through the gaps in her attack, peeking into the future and reading the trajectories, his body finding the spaces between them without slowing, and then he was within reach.
The golden daggers ca fast and from angles that assud knowledge of where he would be.
She was reading his mind.
He reversed the tiline, his body stepping back into the position it had occupied a fraction of a second earlier, the daggers finding empty air.
She corrected.
He reversed again.
She corrected again.
The exchange happened in a fraction of a second, each of them moving through the sa fractured mont, neither able to establish an advantage that the other couldn't imdiately erase.
Then Arlo stopped trying to avoid it.
He let the daggers sink into his chest, and in the sa instant his hands closed around her arms, the grip locking before she could respond to the contact.
He twisted hard, putting everything behind the leverage.
She twisted with him, reading the motion and flowing out of it, but the daggers stayed behind, buried in his chest as she pulled free.
He'd frozen the daggers in place in his chest. If she wanted to escape his grip, she had to abandon them, and she had.
He reached up and drew out the knives. Blood ran across his fingers.
Then the wounds reversed, ti resealing what the blades had opened, the skin closing clean.
Slow clapping filled the room from the doorway.
"That," said the voice, warm and thoroughly entertained, "was an interesting performance."
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