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“Breathe,” she says.

“I am.”

“Then do it better.”

A laugh rips out of me, half smoke and half pain. “Gods, I love you when you’re bossy.”

Her eyes widen for a heartbeat.

Then her expression sharpens in a way that would scare a wiser man. “Survive, and I will address that properly.”

“Motivating.”

She sets the rhythm with her own body, pulse deliberate beneath her fingers, breath steady enough to cut through the roaring hall. The bond locks around that cadence. Her bloodline resonance rises bright and structured, pressing into me with chosen purpose instead of obedience. The devourer hurls itself toward her again, hunting for the weak point, the stabilizer, the supposed leash.

I catch every hook before it reaches her.

“Mine,” I growl.

Isolde’s hand presses harder against my chest. “Careful with possessive declarations in public.”

“I am busy.”

“You are also audible.”

“Good.”

The devourer surges deeper, expecting resistance at the edge of my core. I give it room with intent, drawing the invading essence down into the channels I command. Its consciousness lunges forward, certain I have opened. I let it commit. I let the great mass of hunger pour into the structure under my ribs until the hall trembles around us and my flames climb the walls in reflected gold.

Then I compartmentalize it.

The word sounds too clean for what happens inside me. The act feels like grabbing a storm with both hands and dividing lightning by name. I separate the devourer’s invading essence into strands, splitting appetite from memory, force from will, hunger from identity. Each thread screams as I isolate it. Each thread tries to rejoin the others, and each time it does, Isolde’s pulse anchors mine and gives me the rhythm to cut cleaner.

Rhazek’s voice reaches me through the chaos. “Yes. Thread it through the runes.”

Vaerith hears him too.

His face drains.

“No,” Vaerith says from behind his containment rings. “No, you cannot⁠—”

“Funny,” I grit out. “That word keeps sounding better from other people.”

I spread my fingers against the broken floor.

The hidden summoning runes blaze beneath my palm, eager and corrupt, still carrying Vaerith’s command structure through the estate hall. They are pathways built to drag infernal power upward. I turn them into drains.

The first devourer thread plunges into the nearest rune.

Red light flashes black-gold.

The second thread follows, then the third, then a dozen more, each one stripped of will and driven into the sigils Vaerith embedded beneath his own seat of power. The runes ignite in sequence across the floor, racing away from me in brilliant lines that expose the full geometry of the final summoning. Every hidden anchor, every buried control mark, every bloodline glyph and siphon channel lights up for the witnesses to see.

Isolde’s voice stays close to my ear. “Center spiral. It feeds back to Vaerith’s table.”

“Got it.”

“Left branch goes under the witness dais.”