Richard’s boot skidded on a patch of loose scree just as the first arrow hissed past his ear, embedding itself in the red rock with a sharp crack. A dozen orcs, their forms sheathed in dark, polished leather and gleaming steel, detached from the shadows of the canyon walls above and below. They moved not with brute charge, but with a terrible, coordinated silence. The trap was sprung.

Lillian’s scimitars cleared their sheaths with a single, singing note. Her eyes, usually sharp with calculation, went vacant and wide, her body flowing into a whirling dance before her mind could follow. An orc lunged, its axe a blur; her left blade deflected, her right carved a line across its throat, and she was already spinning toward the next, a beautiful, breathing engine of slaughter. Hilda met the onslaught with a guttural roar that echoed off the stone. Rage, pure and black, swallowed the pain in her leg. She didn’t parry the spear thrust at her chest—she let it graze her ribs, locking the haft under her arm, and wrenched the orc forward onto the upward swing of her warhammer. The sound was wet, final.

Zena was simply gone. One moment she was a silhouette against the rock, the next, empty air. She reappeared behind an orc archer aiming at Lys, her curved dagger finding the gap between helm and pauldron. A choked gasp, and she vanished again, a flicker of movement at the edge of vision, a phantom delivering quick, mortal whispers. Lys, for his part, shed all pretense. As an orc closed in, longsword raised, Lys sidestepped and drove his fist, wrapped not in magic but in hardened leather, into the orc’s throat. He fought with a performer’s grace and a brawler’s cruelty, fingers seeking eyes, boots cracking knees, turning their superior armor into clumsy weight.

Richard breathed, the world narrowing to the orc before him. He felt the symbiote-bond thrum, a live wire of shared tension, but he walled it off. No glyph-light, no borrowed pain. Just the farmboy’s fundamentals. He ducked a sweeping sword cut, feeling the wind of it part his hair. He didn’t slash back; he stepped inside the orc’s guard and drove the pommel of his shortsword up into its jaw. Bone crunched. He shoved the staggering form into the path of another attacker, buying a second to pivot. His muscles, coiled from a lifetime of labor, sang with a familiar, punishing rhythm—dodge, strike, breathe. Sweat stung his eyes. The heat of the canyon pressed down like a fist.

A cry, sharp and pained, cut through the clatter. Lillian, her trance broken, stumbled back, a dagger protruding from the meat of her shoulder. Hilda, distracted by the sight, took a glancing blow from a spiked mace across her temple. Blood sheeted down the side of her face, mixing with the dust. Lys grunted as a spearpoint scored a line across his ribs, parting fabric and skin. Richard felt them all—a spark of white-hot agony in his own shoulder, a thunderclap of pain in his skull, a searing line across his side. The bond, reflexive, shared the damage. He staggered, his focus shattered for one crucial second. An orc’s shield slammed into his chest, driving the air from his lungs and sending him sprawling onto the unforgiving stone.

Zena materialized astride the orc’s back, her legs locking around its torso as her curved dagger punched up through the soft hollow under its jaw. The blade grated on bone, and she leaned her weight into the twist, a wet, crunching pop signaling the severing of cord and vein. The orc collapsed beneath her, and she rolled off the falling body, disappearing into the dust haze before its helm hit the ground.

The shared pain was a second, brutal assault. Richard gasped on his back, Lillian’s dagger-wound in his shoulder a white-hot brand, Hilda’s head wound a pounding drumbeat behind his eyes. Through the bond, he felt the exact moment Lillian’s clinical focus shattered into raw, gasping animal panic, and he felt Hilda’s rage burn hotter, fed by the blood in her eyes. He pushed himself up, his own ribs protesting, and saw Lys drive his thumb into an orc’s eye socket, the motion eerily graceful. The fae-blooded man was breathing hard, a dark stain blossoming across his fine shirt where the spear had scored him, the pain a sharp, bright line in Richard’s own side.

Hilda fought blind on one side, her movements becoming wilder, more devastating. She took a glancing blow from a flail on her already-injured leg, and the shared agony made Richard’s knee buckle. She didn’t scream; she used the pain as a pivot, her warhammer describing a furious arc that shattered an orc’s kneecap. When it fell, she brought the hammer down on its chestplate, the metal buckling with a sound like a rotten bell. Her breaths came in ragged, sobbing growls, each one a tremor in Richard’s own chest.

Richard regained his feet, walling off the symphony of their injuries. An orc advanced, shield high, sword low. Richard feinted left, then dropped, sweeping his leg through the orc’s ankle. As it stumbled, he rose inside its guard, his shortsword punching up under its ribcage. He felt the blade grate, then slide deep into wet heat. The orc’s hot breath blasted his face, stinking of rotten meat, before he shoved it away. His hands were slick with blood not his own.

Silence descended, sudden and ringing. The last orc lay dead. The canyon air, thick with the coppery stench of blood and the sharp reek of voided bowels, pressed in on them. Lillian was on her knees, clutching her shoulder, the dagger still buried there. Hilda leaned on her hammer, blood painting the side of her face and neck in a glistening mask. Lys pressed a hand to his bleeding side, his expression grimly assessing. Zena reappeared, untouched, her dark eyes scanning the bodies, then her companions. Richard stood among them, breathing hard, every injury of theirs echoing in his flesh like a cruel, intimate map. They were all marked, now. All but her.

“Zena,” Richard rasped, the word scraping out of a raw throat. He nodded toward Lillian, then Hilda, the shared pain in his shoulder and skull a nauseating compass. “Heal them. I’m checking the perimeter.” He didn’t wait for a reply, turning his back on the carnage and forcing his protesting legs to carry him toward the canyon’s shadowed bends, his ears straining for any sound beyond the ragged breathing of his companions.

Zena moved to Lillian first. She didn’t kneel; she crouched, a predator assessing prey. Her fingers, slick with orc blood, probed the elf’s shoulder around the dagger’s hilt. “This will hurt,” she stated, her voice devoid of comfort. She wrapped her hand around the grip, braced her other palm against Lillian’s collarbone, and pulled. The blade came free with a sick, wet suck. Lillian gasped, a sharp, inhaled cry that echoed as a hot tear in Richard’s own muscle as he walked away. Zena discarded the dagger, pressed the heel of her hand hard into the welling wound, and from a pouch at her belt produced a pinch of dark, granular powder. She spat on it, mixed it with her thumb into a paste, and packed it into the puncture. It hissed on contact, and Lillian shuddered, her elegant features contorted. The bleeding slowed to a thick ooze.

Richard moved with the careful, ground-eating tread of a boy checking fence lines in a storm. Every scuff of his boot on scree was deliberate. He catalogued the dead orcs—twelve, just as he’d first seen—but their gear was wrong. The leather was oiled and supple, the steel edges honed to a mirror finish, not the crude, notched blades of common raiders. These were soldiers. His eyes tracked upward, following the lines where they had descended. Footholds. Chiseled, not natural. This wasn’t an ambush site. It was a kill box. A cold knot tightened in his gut, beneath the phantom pains of his companions’ wounds.

Behind him, Zena was at Hilda’s side. The dwarf was still standing, leaning on her hammer, her breathing a wet rattle. “Sit,” Zena commanded. Hilda’s one good eye, swimming in a mask of blood, fixed on her with feral resistance. “You are bleeding into your eye. You will miss the next swing, and we will die.” The logic, brutal and direct, won. Hilda sank down with a groan that vibrated in Richard’s own bones. Zena used a waterskin to sluice the blood from Hilda’s temple, revealing a deep, pulsing gash above her brow. The cleaning was merciless, the water icy. Hilda didn’t flinch, but Richard, twenty paces away, felt the shocking cold and the scrape of grit in the wound as if it were his own. Zena produced a needle and gut thread from a sealed vial. She didn’t warn her this time. She just began stitching, the needle piercing, pulling, tying, each tug a bright, precise spike of agony shared across the bond. Hilda sat immobile, her jaw clenched so tight Richard’s own teeth ached.

Richard rounded a narrow bend in the canyon, the symbiote-bond a live wire of their collective suffering at his back. The passage opened into a slightly wider chamber, littered with more of the chiseled footholds. And there, stacked neatly against the wall, were four more sets of gear: waterskins, ration packs, rolled blankets. A reserve team. His blood went cold. The trap had two springs. He opened his mouth to shout a warning just as a low, guttural chant began to echo from the rocks high above, and a new shadow fell across the canyon floor.

Richard didn't think. He charged. The guttural chant from above was a physical vibration in the air, a spell-in-the-making. He sprinted toward the stacked gear, his boots skidding on loose stone, and hurled himself at the four new orcs descending the carved handholds. His shoulder slammed into the lead one’s chest before its feet touched ground, knocking the breath from it in a foul gust. The chant broke into a snarl.

Chaos erupted from the flanks. Hilda was there, a blood-matted fury, her warhammer taking an orc in the hip with a wet crack of shattering pelvis. She was screaming, a wordless roar that was pure, shared rage burning in Richard’s own throat. Lillian moved like a silver dervish, her twin scimitars a blurred cage of steel, but her rhythm was off, jerky—the pain in her shoulder transmitted through the bond as a hitch in every parry, a vulnerability an orc’s axe nearly found.

Lys met his opponent bare-handed. He caught a descending axe-haft, twisted, and swept the orc’s legs out. As it fell, he drove his knee into its throat, the crunch a sickening punctuation. He fought with a performer’s economy, every motion fluid and fatal, but the dark stain on his shirt spread, and each twist sent a fresh, hot lance through Richard’s side. They were all bleeding into each other, a circuit of damage.

Richard grappled with the orc he’d tackled, the world reduced to the smell of its sweat-greased hide, the grit of the canyon floor grinding into his back. He got a knee up, shoved, and rolled as a dagger flashed down where his neck had been. He came up with a rock in his hand and brought it down on the orc’s temple. Once. Twice. The third impact was pulpy. The shared pain in his skull from Hilda’s wound spiked with each blow, a feedback loop of violence.

Zena was a phantom. She appeared behind the orc engaging Lys, her arm snaking around its head, her dagger drawing a deep, red smile across its throat. She vanished as the arterial spray fountained, only to reappear as Lillian faltered, deflecting a killing blow aimed at the elf’s back with her own dagger. “Focus, Silverfoot,” Zena hissed, her voice cold clarity against the bond’s hot static of pain, before melting back into the dust and shadow.

A searing line of fire opened across Richard’s thigh. He gasped, stumbling, and saw the orc before him pulling a shortsword back, slick with his blood. The injury was his, finally, a personal, biting agony amidst the chorus of borrowed wounds. It focused him. He lunged inside the next swing, his own sword plunging into the orc’s belly. He felt the hot gush over his knuckles, the dying convulse. As he shoved the body away, he stood panting, surveying the new silence. They were all standing, barely. Hilda bled from a new cut on her arm. Lillian’s bandage was soaked through. Lys clutched his side, his fine clothes ruined. And Richard’s thigh wept crimson into his trousers. Only Zena remained, unmarked, her dark eyes already scanning the higher ledges, watching for the next spring of the trap.

The bond was a leash. Richard felt it in his skull—not pain, but presence, a second consciousness coiling behind his eyes, trying to steer his focus toward the others, to make their suffering his priority. He gritted his teeth, shoving it back. It wasn’t strength. It was a chain that would yank him off his feet the moment one of them fell. Weakness, dressed up as connection. He focused on the sting in his own thigh, the real blood soaking his trousers, and used that singular, private pain to build a wall in his mind.

They limped back to the narrow bend where Zena had first stitched Hilda. No one spoke. The only sounds were labored breathing and the soft, sick drip of blood on hot stone. Hilda slumped against the wall, her head lolling. The new gash on her forearm was deep, glistening red. Lillian’s silver braids were matted with sweat and dust, her face pale as parchment. Lys leaned next to her, one hand pressed to his side, his usually flippant expression stripped away to reveal a grim, focused exhaustion. Zena appeared from the shadows, her unmarked state a silent accusation. She dropped a scavenged waterskin and a half-empty orcish healing kit at their feet.

“The bond will try to share the healing, too,” Lys said, his voice thin. “If you fight it, you’ll just slow the clotting. You have to let it flow.” Richard ignored him. He tore a strip from his own shirt, wadded it against the sword cut on his thigh, and tied it tight. The pain was a clean, sharp anchor. But then Hilda hissed as Zena poured liquor from a stolen flask over her arm wound, and the sensation washed over Richard—the shocking burn, the muscle flinching beneath it—like water breaking through a dam. He swore, his own leg jerking.

Zena looked up from Hilda’s arm, her dark eyes meeting his. “Your resistance is a luxury,” she stated, no judgment, just fact. She turned to Lillian. “Your shoulder. The stitching tore.” The elf nodded, mute, and began peeling her leathers down from the wound. The sight of it—the inflamed flesh, the black threads hanging loose—sent a sympathetic throb through Richard’s own shoulder. The bond pushed at his walls, insistent, showing him the precise, quivering ache of it. He closed his eyes, but that only made it clearer.

Lys moved to help, his fingers surprisingly deft as he cleaned the wound. The moment his skin made contact with Lillian’s, a jolt went through the bond—not pain, but a raw, open channel of sensation. Richard gasped. He could feel the coolness of the water Lys used, the smooth texture of Lillian’s elf-skin beneath his fingertips, the faint tremor in her muscle. It was intimate, violating. He could feel her trying not to flinch, and feel Lys’s focused concentration, a sharp, clean line of purpose amidst the muddle of hurt. This was the bond’s true trap: it didn’t just share wounds. It shared everything. “Stop fighting it, farm boy,” Hilda grunted, her voice slurred with pain. “You’re just making it hurt more for all of us.”

Richard opened his eyes. They were all looking at him, connected not by choice but by this terrible, shared thread of feeling. His resistance was a knot in that thread, causing friction, discomfort. His private pain was an illusion. With a gut-deep surrender that tasted like defeat, he let the wall in his mind crumble. The bond rushed in, a flood of collective sensation—Hilda’s throbbing arm, Lillian’s seeping shoulder, Lys’s stabbing side, his own burning thigh—all blending into a single, orchestrated symphony of damage. And beneath the pain, something else: the ragged rhythm of four heartbeats, slowly, reluctantly, finding a shared tempo.

The flood of their shared sensation curdled in Richard’s gut, a stew of foreign pain and vulnerability that felt like being skinned alive from the inside. This wasn't connection; it was consumption. With a snarl that was more reflex than thought, he clawed back at the bond, not with walls this time, but with a blade of pure, selfish focus. He found the anchor point in his own body—the hard, aching throb of his cock, untouched and demanding amidst the chorus of wounds. He grabbed Hilda by her unbroken shoulder and shoved her against the sun-warmed canyon wall.

It wasn't an invitation. It was a reclamation. He fumbled with his trousers, his fingers slick with his own blood from his thigh, and then he was pushing into her. Hilda gasped, a sharp, surprised sound, her body accepting him with a wet, hot readiness that echoed through the bond as a shocking bolt of pure physicality. Richard gritted his teeth, fucking into her with short, brutal strokes, using the slam of his hips against her ass, the sharp bite of her nails into his forearm, the ragged sound of his own breathing—all of it—as a battering ram against the psychic noise. He focused on the stretch of her around him, the exact point of heat and friction, the sweat dripping from his brow onto the back of her neck. His world narrowed to the animal simplicity of in and out, the private, roaring fire in his groin that burned away the echoes of Lillian's shredded shoulder and Lys's stabbed side.

Hilda took it, her head bowed against the stone, a low growl building in her throat that vibrated through both their bodies. She understood. This was a fight, and her cunt was the battleground. She pushed back against him, meeting each thrust, the muscles of her stomach and thighs corded and straining. The bond screamed with the intensity of it—not pleasure, but dominance, a furious assertion of self. Zena watched from the shadows, utterly still, her dark eyes reflecting the act without judgment. Lys watched too, his analytical gaze cataloging the way Richard’s jaw was clenched, the way he used the physical cadence to forcibly re-rhythm his own heartbeat away from theirs. Lillian turned her face away, her good hand pressed over her eyes, but she couldn't block out the wet, rhythmic sound, or the way the bond trembled with each impact.

Richard’s climax tore through him like a lightning strike, a violent, white-hot detonation of sensation that was his alone. He spilled into her with a choked-off shout, his body bowing, every muscle locked. For three full, shuddering breaths, there was nothing in the universe but the pounding of his own heart and the fading pulses of his own release. The bond was silenced, pushed back behind a dam of spent flesh and defiant will. He slumped forward, his forehead against Hilda’s sweat-dampened back, the connection now a cold, hard line instead of a flood. He could still feel their wounds, but distantly, like news from another country. The pain in his thigh was his again. The ache in his skull was his. The satisfaction draining from his limbs was his, and his alone.

He pulled out, the air cool on his wet skin. Hilda stayed braced against the wall, her breath coming in heavy gusts. No one spoke. The bond hummed, a tense, thin wire strung between them, bearing the new, solitary weight of him. Richard straightened, meeting Zena’s gaze across the blood-stained ground. Her slight, almost imperceptible nod was an acknowledgment. He had pulled away. He had reasserted the citadel of his self. The cost of that independence glistened on his thighs and on Hilda’s, and it echoed in the strained silence of their shared, wounded space.

Zena moved toward him through the quiet, her steps silent on the scree. She didn't look at his face. Her gaze was fixed lower, on the blood drying on his thigh, on the damp patch at the front of his trousers. She stopped within arm’s reach, the canyon’s trapped heat radiating between their bodies. Without a word, her hand came up, not to strike or caress, but to press her palm flat against the center of his chest, right over his sternum.

Her touch was a cool shock against his sweat-slick skin. He felt her through the bond—not her emotions, but the focused, predatory stillness of her, like a drawn bowstring. Her other hand moved down, fingers hooking into the loosened waist of his trousers. She didn't pull. She just held him there, her knuckles brushing the tense muscle of his lower belly. “This citadel you built,” she murmured, her voice a low thrum in the dry air. “Is the gate locked? Or just barred from the inside?” Her fingers dipped lower, tracing the sensitive skin where his hip met his groin, and the bond flared, carrying the echo of her own damp heat back to him—a deliberate, confounding feedback loop of arousal that was both hers and now, infuriatingly, his.

Richard didn’t move. He held her dark, unreadable stare, his jaw tight. Her exploring fingers found him, still soft, spent from Hilda. She wrapped her hand around him, not to stroke, but to measure. To feel the pulse of blood beneath the skin. The bond screamed the intimacy of it—the calluses on her palm, the exact pressure of her grip, the way his flesh reluctantly stirred at her touch despite his will. It was an audit. “You took your piece back,” Zena said, her thumb sweeping over his tip, collecting the wetness still there from Hilda. She brought her thumb to her own lips, never breaking eye contact, and tasted it. A shudder went through the bond, collective and involuntary. “But the walls are thin, farmer. I can hear everything inside.”

She released him and stepped back, leaving him throbbing and exposed. The canyon air felt like a mockery. From her belt, she drew one of her thin, cruel knives. “The scout I killed carried a horn,” she said, as if discussing the weather. “He did not sound it. The next patrol will be here at dusk. Your independence is a theory. Your body is the fact.” She flipped the knife, caught it by the blade, and offered him the hilt. “You want a self? Carve it out of what’s coming. See if it bleeds only for you.”

Before he could take the blade or speak, a new sensation ripped through the bond—not pain, but a void, a sudden, sucking silence where Hilda’s presence had been. Richard’s head snapped toward her. She had slid down the wall into a crumpled heap, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow and too fast. The gash on her arm had stopped dripping. It just looked black. Lillian was already there, her good hand on Hilda’s neck, feeling for a pulse. “The blood loss… the bond is trying to compensate, pulling from us,” Lys said, his voice strained. Richard felt it then—a creeping lightheadedness, a cold tug in his own veins that wasn’t his. Zena’s test was over. The trap, it seemed, had more than one spring.

Richard’s eyes stayed locked on Hilda’s ashen face. "Zena," he said, the name a cracked command. "The canyon. Find something to slow the poison. Yarrow, cobweb, anything that clots blood or pulls venom. Now."

Zena didn't nod. She was just gone, a ripple of displaced air the only sign she’d moved. The order hung in the heat, a thread of purpose. Lillian was already tearing a strip from her own tunic, her movements precise despite the bond humming with her shoulder’s deep, grinding ache. "Lys," she said, not looking up. "Your fancy blood. Can you trace the toxin? Slow its path?" Lys knelt, pressing two fingers to the blackened edges of Hilda’s wound. His pupils dilated, the silver in them swirling. "I can feel it," he whispered. "A crude thing. Iron and rot. It’s moving toward her heart." He closed his eyes, and a faint, cool scent of mint and damp stone emanated from his touch, a counterpoint to the wound’s necrotic stench.

Richard hauled Hilda upright, her dead weight a shocking vulnerability against his chest. The bond transmitted the frantic, shallow flutter of her heartbeat against his sternum, the clammy chill of her skin seeping through both their clothes. He half-carried, half-dragged her toward a sliver of shade beneath an overhang, the gravel scraping under his boots. Every jarring step echoed up his own injured thigh, a shared protest. He laid her down, the red dust coating her lips, and his hand, still smeared with her blood and his own, went to the dagger at his belt. He needed a fire. Sterilize the blade. Cut the rot out.

Lillian was beside him, her good hand covering his on the hilt. Her touch was furnace-hot, carrying the focused, terrifying clarity of her battle-trance. "Not yet," she said, her elven eyes dilated black. "You cut without the herbs, you just give the poison a fresh road. Wait for her. Breathe. Your panic is a drum in my skull." She was right. The bond trembled with his fear, a sour, metallic taste at the back of all their throats. He forced air into his lungs, each inhale scraping. He focused on the physical facts: the weight of the knife in his hand, the grain of the rock under his knees, the exact point where Hilda’s sweat-damp hair touched his wrist. He built his citadel from grit and will, stone by stone.

A shadow fell across them. Zena stood there, silent as a ghost, a fistful of dusty green leaves and a clump of grayish, fibrous moss in her hand. "Wolf’s bane and old man’s beard," she said, her voice flat. She dropped to her knees, not touching Hilda, and began crushing the leaves between her palms with a ruthless, efficient pressure. A sharp, astringent smell cut through the dust. "The moss is for packing. The juice goes on the wound. It will hurt." She looked at Richard, then at the knife in his hand. Her meaning was clear. The order was given. The tools were provided. The carving was his.

Richard’s world narrowed to the blackened gash on Hilda’s arm, the crushing green paste in Zena’s hand, and the bone hilt of the knife warming in his grip. He did not pray. He did not hesitate. The blade’s point bit into the cold, swollen flesh at the edge of the poison, and he sliced, a slow, grim parting of skin that released a seep of foul, ink-dark blood. The bond erupted. It was not just Hilda’s pain—a distant, submerged throb—that hit him. It was the intimate texture of the cut: the gritty resistance of corrupted tissue, the sudden slippery give of healthier flesh beneath, the precise angle of the steel against bone. He felt it in his own arm, a phantom, meticulous agony.

Hilda’s back arched off the ground, a silent, rigid scream tearing through her. Her eyes flew open, blind with pain, and the bond became a conduit for her raw, unfiltered defiance—a granite cliff face against a black sea. Richard felt her teeth grind, felt the cords of her neck stand taut, felt the animal refusal to die that was her core. He cut another inch, peeling back the skin. Zena’s hand was there instantly, smearing the crushed wolf’s bane into the open trench. The astringent green juice met the rot, and the bond sang with a new, violent sensation: a searing, chemical war that crackled like lightning in the shared space of their nerves.

Lys’s cool fingers pressed against Hilda’s temple, his other hand hovering over the wound. “It’s resisting,” he hissed, his voice strained. The mint-and-stone scent of his magic intensified, clashing with the smell of burnt herbs and necrotic flesh. Richard saw, through the bond’s ghostly overlay, a vision from Lys’s sight: the poison as a network of creeping black roots, recoiling from the herbal purge but digging deeper toward the heart. “You must go deeper, farmer. Where it branches. You must cut the taproot.” The instruction was calm. The cost, the bond shouted, would be exquisite.

Richard took a breath that tasted of Hilda’s sweat and Zena’s herbs. He pressed the blade deeper, following the dark threads mapped in Lys’s shared vision. This time, when he cut, it was into living, healthy muscle to get beneath the venom’s tendrils. The shared pain was no longer phantom. It was a white-hot brand laid across his own bicep, so vivid he gasped. Hilda’s choked groan was a sound he felt in his own throat. Zena packed the gray moss into the new, deeper wound with relentless pressure, her face a mask of detached focus, but the bond betrayed the rapid pulse at her wrist, the slickness of her own palms. Lillian, kneeling at Hilda’s head, held the dwarf’s jaw firm, her battle-trance a dizzying whirl of focused strategy in their collective mind, analyzing pressure points, calculating blood flow, a stark contrast to the visceral horror of the surgery.

He carved the last piece of blackened tissue free—a lump of meat that smelled of a swamp at midnight—and flicked it into the dust. The void where Hilda’s presence had been faded, replaced by a weak, thready pulse of sheer exhaustion. The bleeding from the clean wound was a bright, shocking red. Zena packed the last of the moss, bound it tight with Lillian’s torn tunic strip. The immediate, killing pressure in the bond eased, leaving behind a ragged choir of their individual hurts: Richard’s thigh, Lillian’s shoulder, Hilda’s arm, and a new, deep ache in all their chests from the shared trauma. In the sudden quiet, the only sound was their ragged breathing. Then, from high above on the canyon rim, carried on the dusk wind, came the distinct, metallic click of a crossbow being armed.

Zena was a blur of motion and then simply absent, the air where she'd knelt swallowing her whole. Her disappearance was a silent promise of violence from an unseen angle.

The click from above was a key turning in a lock. Then a dozen more, a chorus of metallic death from both canyon rims. Shapes resolved against the bruised twilight sky: orcs in fitted, dark leathers, their faces obscured by reinforced helms, crossbows leveled. This was no scavenging patrol. This was a tailored kill-box. Richard’s hand stayed on Hilda’s bandaged arm, the bond feeding him her shallow, drugged sleep, even as his eyes tracked the angles. "Shields!" he barked, the farm-boy command raw in his throat. Lillian was already moving, her battle-trance a cool, humming wire in their shared mind. She kicked the flat stone Hilda lay beside, flipping it upward as she yanked her pack around, using both as makeshift cover. Lys’s hands were weaving, not the delicate tracing of healing, but sharp, tearing gestures. A shimmering, concave disk of hardened air solidified before them with a sound like cracking ice.

The first volley hissed down. A bolt skidded off Lillian’s propped stone. Two thudded into Lys’s barrier and stuck, quivering. A third grazed Richard’s already-bleeding thigh, and the bond made it a shared, hot stripe of pain. He didn’t flinch. He felt Hilda’s unconscious body jerk beside him, a phantom echo. From the corner of his eye, he saw one orc on the eastern rim suddenly stagger, his crossbow falling from limp fingers as a dark slit opened across his throat. No sound. Just a puppet with cut strings. Zena was working.

"They’ll drop on us now," Lys hissed, sweat beading at his temples from the strain of maintaining the shield. "The bows were to pin." As if summoned, ropes uncoiled from the rims, and armored forms began rappelling down the sheer walls with brutal, practiced speed. Lillian drew her scimitars, the steel singing a twin note in the dry air. Her trance sharpened, a lattice of calculated trajectories overlaying Richard’s vision through the bond: *Weak point in the leather at the junction of the hip. This one favors his left foot. Strike there.* The information flooded him not as thought, but as instinct.

Richard rose, drawing his own simple blade. He let the glyph’s power pool in his gut—a cold, hungry vortex—but he did not release it. Fundamentals. Footing. Breath. The first orc hit the canyon floor and charged, a hatchet raised. Richard met him not with magic, but with a lifetime of chopping wood: a sidestep that used the orc’s momentum, a short, efficient thrust up under the rim of his helmet. The crunch of cartilage was a localized, personal sound. The bond jangled with Lillian’s approval, a flash of silver-bright focus, and Hilda’s dormant, subterranean rage beginning to bubble up through her stupor.

Then the air erupted. Two more orcs landed behind Lys. He dropped his shield, the concussive release of magic knocking them back a step, and flowed into them. This was not the fae-blooded scholar. His hands moved with a performer’s grace, fingers striking like vipers at throats, eyes, the soft space below armored plates. He moved with a brutal, intimate precision, the crack of bone a sharp punctuation to his silent dance. The canyon floor became a chaos of grunts, clashing steel, and the wet sounds of butchery. Lillian was a whirlwind of silver, her blades tracing lethal arcs that seemed to bend around parries, her trance a shared asset that guided Richard’s own block and shove. He felt a line of fire open across his ribs—his own, this time—and instantly, the bond echoed it across Lillian’s side and drew a flinch from the sleeping Hilda. They were bleeding together, a scattered, wounded whole. Above it all, silent as a shadow, another orc on the rim gasped and fell, his rope cut.

Hilda’s eyes snapped open, but they weren’t her own. They were black pits of distilled fury. The bond didn’t just wake—it erupted, a geyser of pure, volcanic rage that flooded Richard’s senses, drowning the pain in a white-noise roar. She moved before her body should have been able, a guttural roar tearing from her throat as she surged up from the ground, the makeshift bandage on her arm already dark with fresh blood. Her fist, swollen and cracked, connected with the nearest orc’s descending axe-haul, not to block it, but to seize it. The sound was of splintering wood and snapping fingers—hers, his, it didn’t matter. The bond screamed the feedback, a symphony of fractures, and Richard tasted copper as his own knuckles throbbed in sympathy.

She wrenched the weapon free and became a storm. Her style was gone, replaced by a brutal economy of shattered bone. She used the hatchet’s blunt side to cave in a helm, then dropped it to grab an orc by the jaw and the back of his neck. A twist, a wet pop that echoed up the canyon walls, and she was already moving, using the corpse as a shield against a sword thrust. Richard felt every impact through her—the jarring slam of steel on dead flesh, the shudder up her newly wounded arm—but it only fed the frenzy. It was a rage so deep it felt like joy, and it pulsed through their connection, a drumbeat urging violence.

Lys adjusted, flowing around her destruction. As an orc reeled from a glancing blow of Hilda’s stolen shield, Lys stepped in, his elegant fingers finding the gap between gorget and helm. A precise, wrenching jerk, and the orc fell, choking. His eyes met Richard’s across the chaos, coldly analytical even as he moved with lethal grace. “The rage is a bleed, farmer. It will drown her if it’s not channeled. You are the basin.” The instruction was cut short as another attacker lunged; Lys sidestepped, caught the arm, and drove his elbow into the orc’s elbow from the opposite side. The snap was crisp, surgical.

Richard tried to be the basin. He grounded himself, letting Hilda’s berserker flood pour into him, not to feel it, but to hold it. He parried a spear thrust, the shock vibrating up his arm, and shoved forward, driving his shoulder into the orc’s chest. He felt a rib give—his own side ached with the phantom break—and he finished the orc with a short, upward stab to the throat. The blood was hot on his hand. Beside him, Lillian’s twin blades were a constant, humming presence, her battle-trance now a focused channel for Hilda’s chaos, directing the dwarf’s rampage toward the most immediate threats with flashes of silver-bright strategy. A crossbow bolt streaked down from the rim, aimed at Hilda’s exposed back. Lillian’s blade flashed up, deflecting it with a spark, but the effort opened her guard; a club caught her across the thigh, and a hot line of pain seared through Richard’s own leg, buckling his knee for a step.

From the deepening shadows where an orc had just been aiming at Lys, a strangled gurgle sounded. Zena materialized, one hand clamped over the orc’s mouth from behind, the other dragging a wickedly curved blade across his throat. She let him drop, her dark eyes glinting with a ferocity that mirrored Hilda’s but was cold, focused. She didn’t disappear again. Instead, she moved *through* the fray, a visible specter now, her curvy form a lethal blur as she used Hilda’s frontal assault as a distraction. She ducked under a wild swing from the dwarf, came up inside another orc’s guard, and buried her dagger to the hilt in his armpit. When she yanked it free, she was panting, her shiny black hair plastered to her temples with sweat and blood-spatter. For a second, her gaze found Richard’s, and the bond carried no stealth, only a savage, possessive protectiveness that burned as hot as Hilda’s rage.

Zena's curvy form slid through the chaos like oil through water, and then she was against him. Her mouth found his, a hard, bruising kiss that tasted of iron and salt. It wasn't affection; it was a brand. "I got your back," she breathed against his lips, her dark eyes glinting with a feral promise. Then her hand cracked against his ass with a stinging, possessive slap, and she was gone, melting back into the fray as an orc stumbled between them, his throat already blossoming crimson from her unseen blade.

The bond sang with her savage claim, a bright, hot thread woven into the roaring tapestry of Hilda’s rage and Lillian’s crystalline focus. Richard moved on the echo of that slap, parrying a sword strike that jarred his teeth. He felt the new ache in his thigh where the bolt had grazed him, but through the bond, he also felt the deeper, throbbing agony in Hilda’s shattered hand every time she landed a blow, and the sharp, hot line across Lillian’s ribs that mirrored his own. He was a basin, as Lys said, filling with their collective hurt and fury. He let it fuel his fundamentals—a pivot, a block, a thrust that sank into leather and muscle. The orc before him grunted, and Richard felt the resistance give way, a sick, wet slide that traveled up his own arm.

Lys was a study in brutal elegance nearby. An orc charged him with a roar, and the fae-blooded man simply stepped inside the swing, his movements devoid of wasted energy. He caught the descending wrist, used the orc’s own momentum to spin him, and drove his palm upward in a sharp heel-strike under the chin. The crack of the jaw breaking was a dry, awful sound. Lys didn’t pause to look; his cool, analytical gaze swept the canyon, assessing. "Two more on the west rim," he called, his voice calm. "They're reloading." As he spoke, another orc lunged from his blind side. Lys dropped, a sweep of his leg taking the creature's feet out, and as the orc fell, Lys's elbow descended like a hammer onto his throat.

Hilda’s rampage was a tide they all rode. She had discarded the dead orc shield and now wielded a fallen axe in each hand, swinging them in great, wrecking arcs that shattered weapons and bone alike. The bond screamed with the feedback from her broken hand, a white-hot nova of pain that Richard swallowed and held. It fed her, somehow. Her black-pit eyes found his for a fractured second, and he saw it—the rage was eating the pain, consuming it as fuel. An orc spear took her in the meat of her left shoulder, a piercing shock that jolted through Richard’s own body. Hilda roared, not in agony, but in triumph, wrenching herself forward along the shaft to bury an axe in the spearman’s face.

The battle stretched, a marathon of gritted teeth and shuddering impacts. Lillian’s silver whirl began to slow, her trance fraying at the edges. A club she deflected sent a numbing vibration up her arm, and Richard’s own fingers went momentarily clumsy. She took a knife slash high on her cheekbone, a bright sting that made Richard blink blood from his eye. Zena was a constant, lethal pressure in the peripheries, but she was breathing hard now, her movements losing their ghostly silence, becoming defined by the heave of her chest and the sweat tracing paths through the grime on her skin. They were all bleeding, aching, emptying into the basin of him. Richard’s own breaths were ragged saw-blades in his chest, each one shared, each one a debt. The canyon walls seemed to press closer, the dust hanging in the air thick with the copper-sweet stink of their collective struggle.

Richard felt the basin overflow. The flood of their shared agony—Hilda’s shattered hand, Lillian’s split cheek, the deep burn in his own thigh—wasn’t just feedback to endure. It was a charge, a coiled potential. He parried another axe swing, the clang shuddering up his arm, and he stopped trying to hold the pain back. He let it fill him, shape him, and then he pushed it outward, not as a scream, but as a weapon. The orc before him suddenly froze, its yellow eyes going wide with a confusion that wasn’t its own. It stumbled, clawing at its own face as if bees swarmed beneath its skin, as Richard channeled the raw, screaming nerve-endings of Hilda’s broken shoulder directly into its mind.

Lys’s cool voice cut through the roar. “Good. Now sustain it.” Richard gritted his teeth, the effort a cold fire in his skull. He held the connection, making the orc experience the piercing shock of the spear wound as Hilda had, the dizzying wash of blood-loss, and the dwarf’s own furious refusal to fall. The orc dropped to its knees, vomiting into the dust. But the drain was immense; Richard felt his own vision tunnel, the canyon sounds muffled as if he were underwater. He released the projection, gasping, and barely rolled away from a sword thrust that scored a line of fire across his ribs. The new pain was a bright, sharp addition to the chorus.

Hilda, sensing the shift in the bond’s current, fought toward him. Her movements were slower now, the berserker flood receding into a grim, pounding tide. Each step was a labor, each swing a negotiation with gravity. An orc’s club caught her across the back of her knees, and she went down with a grunt that Richard felt in his own joints. She didn’t stay down. On her knees, she grabbed the orc’s leather girdle, pulled him into the rising arc of her axe, and opened him from groin to sternum. The hot, sickening spill of viscera soaked her arms, and the bond carried the slick, awful heat of it to all of them. Richard tasted bile, Lillian’s trance flickered, and Zena, reappearing to slit the club-wielder’s throat, spat into the dirt, her face pale beneath the blood.

Lillian’s dance had become a stagger. A heavy, cleaver-like blade she couldn’t fully deflect bit deep into the meat of her left forearm, and the bond delivered the precise, chilling sensation of steel grating on bone. Her scimitar fell from numb fingers. Richard cried out, his own arm going useless, and Lys was suddenly there, intercepting the killing follow-up blow with a forearm block that snapped the orc’s wrist with an audible crunch. Lys’s own arm didn’t break, but the impact drew a sharp hiss from him, a rare crack in his composure that vibrated through their link as a spike of jarring, shared surprise. He dispatched the orc with a brutal knee to its throat, then shoved Lillian behind him, his elegant hands now red and swollen, poised for the next attack.

The canyon air was solid with dust and the iron-rich stench of spent life. They stood back-to-back in a tightening circle, a battered constellation of shared hurt. Zena pressed against Richard’s side, her breathing a ragged furnace against his neck. Hilda heaved herself upright, one eye swollen shut, her breath whistling through broken teeth. Lillian clutched her mangled arm to her chest, blood seeping between her fingers. Lys stood poised, but a thin trail of blood leaked from his hairline, painting a crimson line down his temple. Richard felt it all—the pounding headaches, the screaming muscles, the dizzying thirst—a symphony of ruin conducted through the bond. He was the basin, cracked and overflowing, and the dozen orcs that remained on the canyon floor and the rims above began to close their circle, their own heavy breathing a promise of an end.

Richard’s vision swam, the canyon tilting, and then his eyes ignited. A searing purple-orange light bled from his irises, casting the sweat and blood on his faces in an unnatural glow. Across the bond, a violent suction ripped through them. Zena gasped as the sharp sting across her ribs vanished, the sensation physically pulling from her flesh like a drawn thread of fire, flowing into Richard. Hilda’s shattered hand went numb, the white-hot agony leaving her so abruptly her knees buckled. Lillian felt the grating bone-pain in her arm cease, and Lys’s bleeding temple sealed itself, the bloodflow reversing into a clean trail. They watched, stunned, as their injuries, their fatigue, their fear siphoned out of them and into the basin of him. Richard’s body shuddered, a vessel over-pressurized, veins standing in stark relief beneath skin that looked too tight. He grabbed Zena’s face, his grip desperate, and kissed her. It was a conduit, not a caress; he was pouring something back into her, a charge of pure, defiant will. He broke the kiss, his voice not his own—a deep, resonant boom that shook dust from the canyon walls. “Get them out. Now.”

Zena’s dark eyes were wide, reflecting his unnatural light. “Richard—”

“GO!” The command was a physical force, a wave of compulsion woven from their own returned strength. It wasn’t a request. It was an order from the bond itself, and for a heartbeat, they all felt it—the absolute, non-negotiable imperative to survive. Zena’s jaw tightened, her loyalty warring with a newer, deeper instinct to obey the nexus of their shared will. She gave a single, sharp nod, her form blurring as she moved not to fight, but to rally, her hand closing around Lillian’s uninjured wrist.

Richard turned to face the closing circle of orcs. He held no weapon. He was the weapon. The accumulated pain of his companions was a storm contained within his flesh—Hilda’s rage, Lillian’s precision, Zena’s lethality, Lys’s cold control. It churned, seeking release. The lead orc, a brute with a serrated falchion, hesitated, its yellow eyes narrowing at the human boy who glowed like a dying star. Richard didn’t charge. He exhaled, and the storm surged forward. It wasn’t a psychic lance this time; it was a wave. The orc’s roar died as it was hit with the full, unfiltered sensory overload of a shattered shoulder, a grated arm bone, a split cheek, a dozen deep bruises and screaming muscles. It collapsed, convulsing, as its nervous system short-circuited under the borrowed agony.

But the dozen others came on. Richard moved, fundamentals etched into his muscle memory, now amplified by a terrible, borrowed vitality. He sidestepped a spear thrust, feeling Lillian’s grace in the pivot, and grabbed the shaft. He channeled Hilda’s brute strength, snapping the haft, and drove the splintered end up under the orc’s jaw. Hot blood sprayed. A sword came from his blind side, and he felt Zena’s spatial awareness—a ghostly pressure in his mind—and dropped, the blade whistling overhead. He came up inside the swordsman’s guard, driving his elbow into its throat with the brutal economy of Lys’s strikes. The crack was satisfying. He was a symphony of them, but the cost was written in the light blazing from his eyes, a light that was beginning to flicker, to dim. He was burning their collective fuel, and the tank was running dry.

Behind him, the retreat was a ragged, bloody ballet. Hilda covered the rear, her movements slower now, devoid of the borrowed pain that had fueled her. A crossbow bolt meant for Lys took her high in the back, near her earlier wound. She grunted, stumbling, and the bond delivered the fresh, piercing intrusion to Richard. He faltered, and a club slammed into his kidney. The world went white. He tasted copper, felt the cool grit of the canyon floor against his cheek. Through swimming vision, he saw Zena dragging a barely-conscious Lillian toward a fissure in the wall, saw Lys fending off two orcs with his swollen, bloody hands. He saw Hilda, on her knees, pulling the bolt from her own back with a snarling scream that held no surrender, only a final, desperate fury. The basin was empty. The light in his eyes guttered and went out.

“No!” The word tore from Richard’s throat, raw and final, as he pushed himself up from the bloodied scree. His body ignited, not just his eyes—a corona of searing purple-orange light erupted from his skin, casting long, monstrous shadows up the canyon walls. He saw Zena vanish into the fissure with Lillian, saw Lys drag a stumbling Hilda toward the same dark crack. A terrible, serene clarity settled over him. “You will not hurt them anymore.” His voice was the grinding of tectonic plates. The magic didn’t flow out; it pulled in. The very air tightened, pressing down on the remaining orcs as they charged. “You will never leave this canyon.” He clenched his glowing fists, and with a sound that was less a roar and more the world cracking a tooth, he brought the canyon down on top of them.

It wasn’t a collapse; it was an implosion. The towering red walls didn’t topple—they leaned inward, as if some giant hand had squeezed the canyon’s waist. Great slabs of sun-baked stone sheared free with a scream of tearing earth, plummeting to crush the orcs on the floor. From above, the snipers’ silhouettes vanished in a cloud of pulverized rock and their own cut-short cries. Richard stood at the epicenter, the light blazing from him the only solid thing in a maelstrom of dust and death. He felt every impact through the soles of his boots—the shuddering, final thuds of a hundred tons of stone finding a new home. The bond went silent, a taut wire humming with the sheer magnitude of the force he was channeling. It was the farm boy’s stubbornness, the glyph’s hunger, and the bond’s collective will fused into a single act of annihilation.

When the last rumble faded, the silence was absolute, a thick, choking blanket of dust. The light winked out of Richard, and he dropped to his knees, empty. His ears rang in the void. Through the slowly settling haze, the canyon was gone, replaced by a chaotic, steep-sloped tomb of shattered boulders. No sky was visible, only a high, dim ceiling of debris. He tasted stone-dust and blood, his own. A warm trickle of it leaked from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes. The bond flickered back to life, not with pain, but with a profound, ringing absence—the hollow echo where the orcs’ violent presences had been.

From the darkness of the fissure, now a mere crawl-space beneath a monumental slab, four strands of sensation reached for him. They were not injuries, but tremors: Zena’s shock, a cold, sharp spike; Lillian’s dazed, pain-numbed wonder; Hilda’s grim, approving satisfaction; Lys’s analytical, wary assessment. They were alive. The cost etched itself into Richard’s marrow. He tried to stand, and his leg buckled, not from wound, but from a depletion so deep it felt like his bones were made of sand.

Zena emerged first, her form coalescing from the dust-cloud like a ghost. She didn’t speak. She simply knelt before him, her dark eyes scanning his broken face, her hands coming up to frame it. Her thumbs wiped at the blood beneath his eyes, a gesture startling in its tenderness. Her own ribs were a dull, shared ache in his side, her fatigue a weight on his shoulders. The connection was no longer a tool, or a curse. It was just fact. They were here, in a tomb of their own making, and they were, for this single, dust-choked breath, together.

Zena’s thumbs were rough, calloused pads scraping gently through the blood and grit on his cheeks. She didn’t look at his eyes; she looked into them, her gaze holding his with a possession that was quieter, more absolute, than any kiss. The bond hummed with it—not just her ribs aching, but the soft, terrified drum of her heart, a rhythm he now felt in his own chest. She leaned forward, her forehead pressing against his. Dust motes spun in the stale air between their mouths. “You idiot,” she whispered, her breath warm and tasting of iron. “Beautiful, suicidal idiot.”

Hilda emerged next, a silhouette of grim fortitude. The crossbow bolt was gone, but the wound wept a dark stain through her tunic. She surveyed the sealed tomb of rubble, her broad face unreadable. “Well,” she grunted, the sound like gravel shifting. “That’s one way to clear a battlefield.” She limped to Richard’s other side, not kneeling, but placing a heavy, grounding hand on his shoulder. Her approval was a solid warmth in the bond, a forge-heat that fought the cold depletion in his bones. Her other hand went to the ugly tear in her own back, fingers probing. “We’re buried. But we’re alive. The math works.”

Lys helped Lillian from the fissure, her movements stiff and graceless. The elf’s left arm hung at a wrong angle, the shoulder dislocated, her fine features pale with shock. Lys’s own hands were a ruin of split knuckles and swelling, but his touch was precise as he guided her to sit against a boulder. His fae-sharp eyes scanned the collapsed ceiling, calculating angles and air supply. “The canyon’s spine is shattered,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. “This pocket is temporary. The weight above will settle. We have hours, not days.” He looked at Richard, and the bond delivered the cool, sharp slice of his fear, expertly sheathed. “You burned the reservoir dry. You feel hollow because you are. Your magic, your vitality… it’s gone. We are all that’s left.”

Lillian’s good hand fluttered to her ruined shoulder, her breath coming in shallow hitches. Through the bond, Richard felt the nauseating, deep-throbbed pulse of the dislocation, a wrongness that echoed in his own socket. Her pain was a cleaner thing than Hilda’s jagged tear or his own systemic emptiness—a single, brilliant point of wrong. “The air… is getting thick,” she murmured, her elven senses straining. “We need to move. But… I cannot.” Her confession was a whisper of shame in the link. Zena rose, leaving Richard’s side to kneel before the elf. Without a word, she placed her hands on Lillian’s arm and shoulder. She looked into Lillian’s pained eyes, and a silent understanding passed between them—a negotiation. Then, with a brutal, practiced jerk, Zena snapped the joint back into place.

The pop was loud in the dusty silence. Lillian’s scream was swallowed, transforming into a sharp, shuddering gasp. The relief that flooded the bond was immediate, a sweet, cooling rush that made Richard groan. It was followed by Lillian’s shaky, tearless sob. Zena held her, not as a lover, but as a fellow weapon, her face buried in the elf’s sweat-damp blonde hair. “You carry your share,” Zena murmured against her scalp. “Now we all carry yours.” Hilda moved, a shadow in the dimness, her hand finding Richard’s to haul him upright. His leg held, barely. “Lead,” she said, the word not a request. The bond was a map now, a web of their collective hurt and remaining strength, and at its center, his hollow core was the compass. They would move as one damaged body, or not at all.

The protective bubble of force Lys had woven held for three more shuddering breaths—long enough for Hilda to drag Richard back toward the fissure—then it popped with a sound like a giant glass bell cracking. The released energy shot Lillian, Zena, and Lys forward like stones from a sling, tumbling into the deeper darkness of the tunnel. The counter-force slammed into Hilda and Richard, hurling them backward in the opposite direction. Hilda, dense as mountain root, grunted as she hit a sloping wall of rubble and slid, dislodging a cascade of smaller stones. Richard was airborne for a moment, a weightless thing, before the world collapsed onto him. Something heavy—a slab of canyon wall—caught him across the shoulders and drove him down into the scree. Darkness, immediate and absolute, swallowed him whole.

Consciousness returned as a single, pressing fact: weight. He was pinned, chest-down, beneath an immovable mass of stone. His left arm was free, twisted awkwardly above his head. His right was crushed beneath him, numb. He tried to breathe, and dust filled his mouth, his lungs seizing. Panic was a silent scream in his hollow chest. The bond was a void—a deafening, empty silence where four other heartbeats should have been. He was alone in a way he had not been since the glyph first took root. The darkness was so complete it felt liquid. He heard only the drip of distant water and the groan of settling rock. His own heartbeat was a frantic, trapped bird against stone.

Hilda’s hands were already moving, claws scraping at the rubble where the bond’s faint, frayed thread pulled her. She didn’t think, she dug, heaving aside stones the size of a man’s torso, her muscles corded and screaming. The connection was a triplicate pulse in her skull—Lys’s cool, sharp focus; Zena’s coiled, silent alarm; Lillian’s pained, fluttering light. A three-pointed star. The fourth point, the center, was a nullity. A void where Richard’s presence had been. She tore at the rock, her breath coming in ragged, dust-choked grunts, following the only map she had left.

She broke through into a slightly larger pocket of stale air, and the three figures materialized from the gloom. Zena was on her feet, blades out, eyes wild. Lillian was braced against a wall, cradling her recently-set arm. Lys stood between them, his fae eyes glowing faintly. His gaze swept past Hilda, counting, and the calculation in them froze. “Where is he?” Lys’s voice was a blade of ice. Hilda just shook her head, a single jerk toward the crushing darkness behind her. Lys didn’t hesitate. He raised his ruined hands, and a shimmering, bubble-like hemisphere of force erupted from his fingertips, slicing through the intervening rubble like a ghost. It wasn’t an attack. It was a desperate, precise containment spell, seeking the hollow signature of Richard’s depleted core to encase and protect what little of him remained.

Under the slab, Richard felt the change in the air pressure before he saw the light. A faint, blue-white luminescence seeped through the cracks around him, and then the crushing weight on his back… shifted. It didn’t vanish, but it was now held at bay by a hair’s breadth, a cushion of solid light separating stone from his spine. He could breathe. A shallow, dusty gasp filled his lungs. The bubble encased him, a cocoon humming with Lys’s will. He tried to reach out with the bond but he was over spent and the attempt made him pass out