Page 150 of The First Scar
Then they caught.
The two currents stopped fighting and spiraled—a double helix winding tighter and tighter in my core, building pressure with nowhere to go.
Fifty heartbeats. I can hold fifty.
My vision whited out. Came back in pieces—the altar, the conduits, the Rupture, all of it swimming behind a film of heat.The power tore out of me through every point the ropes touched skin, following the glyph-channels in the fibers, ripping down the conduits toward the altar in a torrent of silver-white and ink-black.
The ground shook. My legs went first. Feeling drained out of them from the hips down like someone had pulled a plug—thighs, knees, calves, gone. The ropes were the only thing keeping me upright. My hands spasmed open behind the rod, fingers splayed and useless.
I was emptying. I could track it—a tide pulling out from my extremities toward my center. Fingers. Forearms. Then the cold crept past my elbows and I knew that when it reached my chest, there would be nothing left.
I held on. Held the fusion steady. Aimed it at the Rupture.
Heal, I thought.Stitch. Mend.
Kaelen's chant intensified. His hands moved faster, more frantic—then he wrenched something from the folds of his cloak—
The Codex.
The one that should have been in my satchel.
Its pages were no longer empty. Glyphs I'd never seen crawled across the pages, festering with sick light.
He lunged, stepping directly into my stream of power.
The Codex captured the torrent like a dam catching a river. My energy slammed into its pages instead of the Veil—redirected, swallowed,twisted.
The runes ignited. Black-and-white flame erupted from the book itself, consuming my power, bending it into a purpose I hadn't chosen—
"Kaelen—" My voice came out strangled. "What are you—"
And I knew—in my bones, in my blood—that I had made a terrible mistake.
"You weren't born to obey fate, Amaria." His voice was calm. Almost gentle. "You were born to end it."
The cold that flooded me had nothing to do with the Veil.
"You'll finish the wound," he said. "By choice or by chain."
I pulled against the ropes. They didn't give.
"You're not healing it," I gasped. "You'reUnmakingit—"
"Unmaking the disease." He didn't even look at me. His eyes were on the Codex, watching my power pour through it like he was admiring his own handiwork. "The Codex was always a conduit to the Veil—every law, every writ, every caste designation written directly into its fabric. All I had to do was rewrite its purpose."
The glyphs on the pages pulsed—my power,filtered throughhis purpose. And something in those runes had its hooks in me. I couldn't stop the flow any more than I could stop my own heartbeat.
He smiled. "No, you're not healing the Veil, Amaria. You're feeding it one command only. And that command isUnmake."
The roar of the battle swelled—hooves thundered, blades sang, the Hounds snarled, the sound of ripping flesh and screams.
"We tried reform. We tried rebellion. But the rot goes too deep." He looked at the howling sky with terrifying calm. "There is no cure for a system built on the oppression of half its people. The only honest choice left is to cauterize the wound. Burn it all away, and let the truth grow from the ash."
The Codex swelled. My power poured into it, unstoppable, a river I couldn't dam.
I wasn't the healer.
I was the bomb.
