Page 47 of The First Scar
One step. The filament beside my ankle flared back to brightness, but I was already past it. Another step. My Shadow strained, trying to dampen two threads at once. The fusion started to slip—Shadow and Light pulling apart like wet hands losing grip.
Hold. Hold.
Two more steps. The lattice blazed around me, a web of frozen lightning, and I was threading through it on instinct now—reading with the Light, dimming with the Shadow, my body a needle weaving through impossible gaps.
My vision tunneled. My lungs burned.
One more step.
I cleared the lattice and stumbled, catching myself on the inner chamber’s archway. My marks snapped apart, the fusion dissolving like smoke in wind. I pressed my forehead to the brisk stone, heaving and sweat dripping down my temples despite thechill. I’d made it to the golem’s warden chamber, where the key was kept.
Three heartbeats. I'd held it for maybe five.
Dreadscale would be insufferably pleased.
I opened my eyes and scanned the chamber. Circular, low-ceilinged, the walls lined with empty weapon racks and the remains of a wooden table that had rotted down to its iron nails. Dust coated everything—thick enough to muffle my boots, the air stale and sealed. And with it, a hum—faint, persistent, growing louder with every step I took past the threshold.
Then I saw why.
The golem crouched beside the glyph pedestal. A hulking mass of fused brick and prehistoric mortar, easily twice my height, light runes crawling across its shoulders in a faint, sleepy pulse. A Stone-Wight Guardian. They were supposed to be extinct.
This one hadn't gotten the message.
The Wight's eyes were dark. Dormant. But a shimmer lingered behind them—two sensors, one bright, one dark, waiting to register intrusion. My Luminar mark prickled with recognition. I'd seen wards like this in the old texts Serenya hoarded. Dual-natured. They couldn’t be tamed or unlocked by Light or Shadow alone.
Only byboth. Meant as a safeguard to never be disabled, since it should be impossible to use both at once.
Any normal intruder would trip one sensor or the other—their soulmark announcing them like a dinner bell. But both at once, in the same body, from the same source? The ward wouldn't know what to make of it.
In theory.
One step. Two. The Wight's eyes flickered—a pale light stirring in the left socket. It had sensed my Luminar Mark. The runes on its shoulders began to warm, shifting from dormant gray to a dull, threatening amber.
Shit.
Two more steps. Then—shouts. Outside. Below.
I spun toward the arrow slit and peered out, heart pounding.
Maxx.
The enforcers had seen through his glamour. Half a dozen of them closing in, and Maxx—gods-damnedMaxx— bound in a rune-locked lasso that roiled with that same sickly amber glow. It cinched tighter around Maxx with every thrash—an amber snare only Mark-tempered steel could sever.
My hand flew to my belt. To the knife. Theoneknife I'd taken because I was too proud, too paranoid, too stupidly stubborn to accept a full kit from people I didn't trust.
One blade. And Maxx needed it to survive.
But I needed that key, and without Mark-tempered steel, touching it would wake every ward in the tower.
I ran to the parapet's edge, scanning desperately. Brannick and Ryla held position on the south wall—stone and sixty feet of empty air between them and Maxx on the north side. They couldn’t reach him in time. Not without a blade that could pass through walls.
If I throw him mine, I lose the key. If I don't—
Maxx's shoulders wrenched as he fought the lasso. The runes blazed brighter. He had minutes. Maybe less.
Maybe I can grab the key first. Quick. Before—
I turned back toward the pedestal, took two hurried steps—
