Chapter 327: As above, so below 2
MADELINE
It was just there, huge and ragged, carrying across the dark space and coming back to
from the stone walls in fragnts.
I clenched my teeth as it faded and sat there shaking, the mana collapsed back into nothing, leaving
hollow and scorched.
"Cian!"
My voice broke on his na.
"Cian! Where are you?"
I had nothing. Only the echo of my own voice and then silence.
"This is not what we agreed to!" I heard the way my own voice sounded, high and cracking, and I hated it. "Cian!"
Still, there was no answer.
I tried again with the ropes. Not fire this ti. Sothing simpler, just a pull of force to loosen the knots, the kind of basic working I had done a thousand tis without thinking. The magic moved toward my hands and sothing inside
opened, sharp and deep, like a blade finding the inside of a wound that had no outside. There was no visible cut. There was no blood. There was just the feeling of being opened from the inside, and I bit down on my lower lip hard enough to taste tal and scread through my nose until it passed.
I sat very still.
What was fucking happening—
Oh... was this the pact?
I had made it with my own hands and my own blood and my own words. I had made it carefully. I had made it to an sothing, to prove sothing, and now every ti I reached for my power the binding read it as aggression against Cain sohow. It was reading the ropes, reading my captivity, reading the intent to free myself, and sowhere in its logic it was finding that that put Cian in danger.
It had been a stupid thing to do.
I knew that now in a way I had not let myself know before. I had built that pact on the assumption, the deep animal assumption, that Cian would never do this. That there was a floor beneath us. That even at our worst, we would not arrive here.
I put that thought down before it could beco sothing I could not carry.
Think, I find myself. Think clearly.
The ropes were the problem. The ropes were the trigger. If the pact believed my magic was moving against Cian and the ropes were the obstacle between
and that, then I needed to convince the pact the ropes were nothing more than ropes. A nuisance. Not a weapon sohow being removed from the field. It had to be sold to the divine that I just wanted the ropes off.
I organized that thought carefully. I placed it at the front of my mind like a sign over a door. The ropes are biting into my arms. I want them off because they hurt. Only that. Only the comfort of it.
I gathered myself. Kept my intent small, specific and deliberately dull. Then I opened my mouth and chose a rhy spell, simple and rhythmic, the verbal kind we learned young because the repetition was grounding, because the words could carry the intention cleanly without the dangerous compression of pure thought-cast.
The first line ca out steady.
"Rope that tightens, rope that binds,"
The second.
"Hear my will and change your mind."
I took a short breath. Nothing violent was happening. That was a good sign.
"Loosen fiber, slacken thread," I had barely made it halfway through the third when the cough ca without warning.
It ca fast.
Too fast.
The taste hit first, thick and tallic, flooding the back of my tongue before I understood what was happening. Then it forced its way up and out of , hot and heavy. I folded forward in the chair, the ropes cutting deeper as my body jerked, and it spilled from my mouth in a wet rush.
It didn’t stop.
It kept coming, choking, dragging sothing deeper with it. I spat, but it clung, stringing from my lips to the floor in dark strands that looked too thick, too wrong, as if it didn’t belong inside
at all.
My hands shook.
No, not shook, they tremored, sharp and uneven, like sothing was knocking against my bones from the inside, trying to get out.
The magic I’d gathered didn’t just fade, it broke apart, scattered in jagged pieces I could still feel scraping along my nerves.
The ringing in my ears swelled.
It swallowed everything else until it felt like the sound was inside my skull, not my ears, like sothing had burrowed in and was screaming where no one else could hear it.
I tried to breathe.
The air stuttered halfway down my throat and ca back up wrong, wet, dragging another mouthful with it.
More blood hit the floor, darker this ti, thicker, and for a second I thought I saw it move, a slow, creeping shift like it was reaching for sothing.
The ropes tightened.
I hadn’t moved.
They dug into my skin anyway, fibers twisting and biting deeper as if they were reacting, as if they could feel what I had tried to do and were punishing
for it.
"No," I said.
My eyes moved upward without quite aning to.
Because what the fuck was happening? That didn’t feel like no damn pact retaliating.
This was far more sinister.
The ceiling stretched above , rocky and uneven. It dipped low at the edges and rose higher toward the center.
That was where I saw them.
Runes.
Carved so precisely they almost disappeared into the grain of the stone. There were dozens, maybe more, layered over one another in a tight, overlapping web. They spread across the entire ceiling, and I knew without looking that they probably covered so of the walls too, the floor, and maybe even the air itself.
Warding runes.
The old kind. The kind that did not just suppress magic but devoured it, that reached inside a working and unmade it from the root and sent the backlash straight back into the caster’s body.
These looked like strong ones. If anything, I felt them. They were powerfully made, carefully layered, by soone who knew exactly what they were doing and had taken their ti doing it.
The ropes were almost secondary.
I had not needed to be tied to a chair. The runes were the real prison. The ropes were just so I did not wander.
The realization settled over
cold and complete.
It felt like Cian had planned this. Not on the walk here, not in a mont of anger or panic. He had found this place or made this place, carved or commissioned those runes, bound
here, and left. He had done it before he ever stood in that room with
and asked
to prove myself.
Before I had bled for him and spoken those words and felt the pact close around us both like a hand.
I felt betrayed. The worst I had ever felt.
I opened my mouth.
"Cian." My voice ca out lower this ti, steadier than I expected. "You can’t do this to ."
The space said nothing.
"My family needs ." The words landed in the dark and dissolved. "Cian, please."
Still nothing.
The cobwebs moved in a draft that ca from sowhere I could not identify, slow and unhurried, like they had been moving that sa way for years.
"Ciaaaannnnn!"
His na tore out of
and filled every inch of that stone space and bounced back from every wall, smaller and smaller until it was just a whisper, and then nothing at all.
"Please, Aldric will destroy us. Please!"
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