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She reached behind herself and pressed the relic against her back, where the fifth mark sat. The tattoo nearest the surface, the least settled. The most recently opened.

The contact was an animal sound. Something inside her made it. She didn't know if she'd spoken or if her body had spoken without her.

Her spine arched. The five marks burned in sequence, each line of fire travelling up her back faster than the last. By the fifth she couldn't tell where the marks ended and her bones began. Her spine was being unmade along the marks her mother had drawn.

Vinea began to laugh. Then he stopped laughing.

"What are you doing?"

She didn't answer. She drew her blade.

She didn't strike at Vinea. She didn't strike at the daemon plane. She struck at the relic pressed against her own spine. The blade met the relic through the her own back. It stabbed through her skin and stopped against the relic's surface. She drove it in further.

The relic split and opened against her spine. Her dragon-blood, all of it, rose to meet what was inside.

For one moment she was not separate from the relic. The witchwyrm's heart, ancient beyond her, pulsed once against her own pulse. She felt, for one impossible breath, the dragon whose heart this had been, long before her line had been distilled down from the dragons into women with marks on their backs.

The relic recognised her and let go.

The split in its surface opened all the way. A gold-like liquid substance poured out of the relic into the marks on her spine and through the marks and out into the daemon plane behind her.

Vinea screamed.

The scream was not what Idonea had expected. Vinea didn't lunge for he couldn't. The marks on Idonea's back, having received the relic's contents, were closing. One by one in the order they had been opened, but in reverse. Each one sealing took a piece of Vinea's substance with it. He was being woven back into the Nexis along the lines that had been meant to bring him out.

The lion-form lost its mass. The serpent in his hand dissolved into smoke. The thousand voices in his voice became one voice, then half a voice, then no voice. The last thing she saw of him was the shape of his eyes, and then nothing.

The marks on her spine sealed shut.

The relic, what was left of it, fell from her back to the stone with a sound like a coin dropping. A husk of gold with nothing left in it.

The daemon plane shuddered. Cracks ran in every direction and the light dimmed. Above her, Lance shrieked from very far away.

Her legs wouldn't let her stand.

Idonea didn't to speak; she wouldn't have been able.

She had been the door. She had unmade the door. The marks on her back were silent. She hadn't known how loud they had been until they stopped. The silence settled wrong, then grew stranger still. For the first time in years there was nothing beneath her thoughts that didn't belong to her.

She fell forward onto her hands.

Lysander was beside her before she'd fully fallen. He caught her shoulders. He didn't say anything. He held her up.

The blade was still in her back. He took the handle gently and pulled it out. The wound bled, but he didn't feel it; her body had spent its capacity for pain on the marks.

Lance landed on the stone beside them. He pressed his head against her hand. She breathed out, and let him.

She managed a sound that was both a laugh, and not, and turned her face into Lysander's shoulder. There was only the sound of their breathing.

Lysander’s hand found hers, gripping tightly. “We made it.”

“Yes." Her voice was hoarse.

Lance coiled near her feet.

She drew a ragged breath, letting her head fall forward. "I've killed my mother, Lysander. I had to kill her." Her voice didn't break. The crying part of it had been used up in the marks. "And I've unmade what she made of me. I don't know yet if those were the same act. I think they may have been."

His hand tightened around hers, grounding her.