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Idonea drew a slow breath. The air burned faintly in her lungs. "I am not yours." The words rang true, yet they remained agonisingly complex.

Nellith lifted her hand. The Current came at her like a thrown weight.

Idonea was on one knee before she knew her body had moved. The cold ground bit through her trousers, her shoulder, and her palm where she caught herself. Her own Current rose to meet the strike and was driven back, ringing in her bones like a struck bell. She had never had Current push like that. Not in any working. Not from Nellith. Not from anyone.

The daemon plane should've eaten it. The vapours should've smothered it. Her mother was wielding Current here as if the plane itself made way for her.

Nellith lowered her hand. "Such fire," she said. "Such stubbornness. I made you well."

Idonea didn't stand yet. Her knee stayed on the stone, and she breathed. "Tell me what you want."

"For you to understand, child. The relic, the Nexis, the marks I gave you — they are part of something larger than what you have allowed yourself to see."

"I don't care."

"I know. That is the problem."

The shadows around Nellith stretched. They reached, not at Idonea, but past her, tasting the air for her edges. One slid briefly along the back of her hand. It was warm, not cold. That was worse.

She stood. Her knees didn't betray her; she made sure of it. "I came here to break what you built. That has not changed."

Nellith smiled at her. The smile was not unkind. That was the worst thing about it. "And yet, here you are."

Far off, in a place Idonea couldn't see, something growled.

Then another, closer. Then a third. The daemons were aware of her.

Her pulse climbed; she needed something. She had no access to the Current and the daemon plane was eating her edges. She needed a channel.

She blinked. The thought came as cleanly as the needle on her spine had come, years ago. Eitr.

Other than Current. Other than what she'd been reaching for. The substance she'd been smelling on Lysander for months without naming, distilled by the Order from dragon-bled roots, the same matter the witchwyrms had been made of before the Sundering scattered them into the soil.

The relic had been calling to it. Idonea understood, with a flash of perfect lucidity, that the relic had been pulling Eitr through itself into the Nexis for as long as the working had been preparing. This region of the daemon plane was changed. It was a poisoned threshold, a place where dragon-substance had been bleeding into devourer-substance, and the bleeding hadn't yet finished.

No wonder Vinea was desperate. He had been calling the door open into a region of his own home that was becoming toxic to him.

The Eitr was here because the working had brought it. And Idonea, Idonea with firstborn blood in her veins, Idonea who'd been shaped by her mother's hand to receive what the daemons could not, could reach for it.

She let her breath out and reached.

The Eitr didn't come to her the way the Current did. Instead of flowing, it gave, like a hand pressed against another hand, letting her draw from it.

Violet-black light curled along her fingertips.

Nellith's eyes narrowed. "Clever girl."

"I had a good teacher."

"You did."

Idonea didn't move yet. The Eitr in her palms was hot in a way her own Current was not. The plane was letting her stand here, and there was no telling how long the permission would last.

"I will leave here alive," she said. "Or I will not. I will not serve you. And the relic should not exist."

Nellith looked at her for a long moment.

For the first time since the dark had gone flat overhead, something passed across her mother's face that was neither certainty nor fear. Frustration, maybe.