Page 90 of Unveiled

Adrian took the breath the cold had stolen. “Irial,” he whispered. “If you can, if you can—”

Now, she said, and something pushed.

The stone in Adrian’s hand burned. Not flame, but like a coal blown to brightness. A second circle ghosted over the first, rougher, Desert Realm cuts overlaid on Highland lines, and the two didn’t cancel, they caught.

The rend bucked. Something inside it howled, furious, surprised, and hungry.

And something else answered from behind it. A smaller sound, human, desperate.

“Irial.” Adrian’s vision blurred. He tightened his grip, felt the angle of the notch, and pulled.

For a heartbeat, a shape appeared at the threshold. A girl with ash in her hair and blood on her lip, her eyes open but not seeing what was in front of her but seeing through it. Irial.

She lifted her hand as if she had been reaching for him for hours across a dark sea.

The entity slammed its palm against the circle. The construct quivered, not like a wall but like a drum.

“Connor,” Adrian cried. He didn’t need to say more.

Connor hit the entity’s side, his shoulder driving through it as if through smoke too cold to be air, his chain wrapping, his knife biting. The creature convulsed. The chain glowed red at one link, then white. The shadow shattered like a living cloth under strain.

“Down,” Connor said. The word came from somewhere wolves remembered long after men forgot. Down. The entity’s limbs jerked and bowed without meaning to.

The Mouthpiece tilted. Veilwarden request not acknowledged.

“Wasn’t asking,” Connor panted, and tore. The entity was unravelling.

The rend tried to take the unravelling back, as if the dying could be recycled, and Adrian refused its movement. He held the circle on breath and pain, and a thread of Irial’s stubborn will.

“Step,” he whispered. “Please step.”

Irial’s foot crossed the line.

The clearing reacted as if a metal bar had been struck. Everything rang in different pitches: tree, stone, bone, mark. The circle flared so bright that shadows were thrown back like startled birds. The Mouthpiece hardened, gathering intent.

Compensation required.

Connor laughed. A terrible, delighted sound that had nothing to do with joy. “Come and collect it.”

The ground split again. A third entity began to form.

“Enough,” Adrian said, and the word came out calm because there was nothing else left. He let go of the outer ring—the one that held the wound at its current size—and focused everything he had on a knot. Circles fail. Knots hold. He set the charm against the invisible weave of the air where rend met world and turned it like a peg into wood. It bit. He turned again. It held.

“Connor,” he whispered, because speaking the name steadied the knot.

“I’m here,” Connor said. And speaking back tightened it.

The rend shrank a finger’s width. The Mouthpiece saw. The clearing bent under the weight of its attention.

Marked. Yield. But its voice was fainter. Confused.

“Bite me,” Adrian muttered. Irial’s small, cold fingers found the back of his coat and pulled him back as he thrust the circle and all its magic into the rend, together with Irial’s stone. The Mouthpiece’s body cracked like a pane of winter glass.

Adjustment. Acknowledged.

The rend sulked. There was no other word for it. The pressure lessened—not by much, but enough for Adrian to breathe without feeling he inhaled razors.

He couldn’t stay upright. But he stayed conscious when he might have fallen, because Connor’s hand was on the air over his mark again and the wolf-voice spoke in his marrow.