While they were all fighting, Jake was screaming.

He had not meant to start screaming. He had been managing — barely, by the thinnest margin of the word’s meaning, but managing—until the cauldron’s pulse changed.

It had been slow at first.

The rhythmic contraction and expansion of the light, the deep orange warmth of it moving through the tendrils that held him, was something that was almost comfortable, almost the quality of heat on a cold morning, almost something he could have endured.

Then the pulse accelerated.

And the pain arrived.

He felt he was being devoured, continuously feeling the energy drain from his body.

It came from his chest — not from his injured ribs, not from the cut on his palm, but from somewhere beneath both of those, somewhere that had no anatomical name because it was not an anatomical location.

It was a deep and central part of him. He could feel it pulling at him, something far more ancient than him.

Pulling.

He felt it as an extraction.

There was no better word. Something was being drawn out of him — not blood, not breath, not anything the body lost in ordinary violence — something older and stranger and more fundamental, and the losing of it was a pain that had no comparison in two lives’ worth of experience because nothing in either life had ever tried to take something that was this deeply his.

The veins appeared gradually.

He noticed them on his left arm first — dark, deep purple against his skin, spreading from his shoulder downward like frost spreading across glass, branching and dividing with the same organic geometry. It wasn’t blood or bruises.

Something thicker, something that moved with a visible slowness through the vessels, as though whatever was happening to him had changed the nature of what ran through him.

From his chest — from the center of the pulling — a substance fell.

Thick and dark, the color of shadow given body, it descended from him in slow, heavy drops into the bowl below, and where it touched the glowing surface, it vanished, absorbed, and was consumed by the cauldron’s patterns with a hunger that had no visible expression but was present in the way the light brightened slightly with each drop.

His essence.

That was what came to his mind seeing the dark thick form of liquid.

He understood it without being told, with the bone-deep certainty of someone who had just been introduced to the thing they were losing by the experience of losing it.

The system was not responding.

He screamed and screamed again.

Maudlina heard it, the woman who came with Ankerita. She was Ankerita’s older sister.

She heard it across the noise of the fight — across the clash of the iron-suited men pressing the eastern formation, across the specific percussive sounds of her own engagement with Bearfang, across Ankerita’s blade work and Eskar’s crossbow, and across the vast disorganized violence of two forces meeting at a road-rest in a valley that had not asked to host any of this. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

She heard it because she had been listening for it.

Her eyes went to the cauldron — to Jake suspended above it, to the dark veins spreading across his arms and throat, to the thick dark substance falling from his chest into the bowl — and something in her face shifted.

Not panic. Not fear. Something more contained than both, the expression of a woman who had known something was going to happen and had arrived too late to prevent the beginning of it and was now calculating how to prevent the rest.

"Bearfang!!" she shouts out loud.

"If that boy dies in the cauldron, you will have started something that nobody in this valley will survive, including your people."

His rhythm didn’t break.

But his eyes moved — involuntarily, the trained fighter’s reflex overridden for just a fraction of a second by something that lived underneath training.

They went to Jake. To the dark substance falling into the bowl.

To the cauldron’s pulse, which had accelerated again.

"That’s not my concern," he said.

But he said it one beat slower than he should have.

"It will be," Ankerita said.

The deep blue around her hands gathered — not a wave this time, not outward, but inward, concentrating, compressing into a point at her palm that went from blue to something approaching white at its center, and the air around it stopped doing what air normally did.