"Six days of a siege. Two hundred and thirty people who stayed at the walls when leaving was available to them because leaving meant a village got no warning and no time."

The rubble field behind them continued settling, with small sounds of debris finding its final positions.

"And at the end?" Maudlina asked.

"The binding that held them here," Jake said.

"A general who’d been waiting a long time for someone to walk in and ask the right questions." He felt the fragment’s warmth in his closed fist.

"He asked to be freed."

Maudlina was quiet for a moment, running whatever internal process she ran when information arrived that required reorganizing existing structures to accommodate.

"The artifact," she said.

"The thing you’re holding—that’s what it was in the dungeon?"

"It’s a fragment of a god’s—"

Suddenly, he felt a sharp, hot, stinging-like pain.

AHh!

The fragment burned.

It wasn’t exactly heat, but he felt something worse than heat. It went from warm to white-hot between one breath and the next, and Jake’s hand locked around it against his will, every muscle in his fingers seizing shut with a force that belonged to something else entirely.

He tried to drop it; he shook his hand repeatedly but couldn’t.

His hand wouldn’t open; it was wrapped around the object.

"Jake."

"Are you all right?"

Ankerita stepped forward, reading his face.

But she stopped as she saw the light coming from his hands. It was like rays of hot light coming out of his palm.

It bled through the gaps between his fingers first, then through the skin itself, turning his fist translucent before it became too bright to look at directly.

ARRGHhHH!!!!

The group fell back by instinct, feeling the extensive pressure coming to him. They all felt it, like a sudden onslaught of pressure. They drew their weapons involuntarily, though weapons were useless against such intense pressure.

The system didn’t pulse.

It blared right in front of his face with red color.

[CRITICAL ALERT — IMMEDIATE]

[DIVINE FRAGMENT STATUS: ACTIVE — HOSTILE]

[FRAGMENT ENTITY: CONSCIOUS — AGGRESSIVE]

[OBJECTIVE: SOUL DISPLACEMENT OF CURRENT HOST]

[TARGET: JAKE RAIKARNDEL]

[SYSTEM ENGAGING DEFENSIVE PROTOCOLS — OUTCOME UNCERTAIN]

Jake felt it the moment the words landed behind his eyes.

Something vast was moving through his palm, up his arm, spreading into his chest with the patient deliberateness of something that had been waiting inside the fragment for a very long time and had just found exactly what it needed.

It wanted his body.

It wasn’t possession or influence. It was a replacement.His soul pushed sideways and out while something ancient poured itself into the space he occupied, wearing his flesh the way a man wore a coat he’d taken from someone else.

He pushed back.

It was like pushing a tide with open hands.

His bloodline responded, the shadow reserves rising to meet the intrusion, and for a moment he thought it would be enough.

The entity met the shadow essence and stopped, the two forces pressing against each other in the space behind his sternum with a violence that had no physical expression yet.

Then the entity pushed harder.

The shadow reserves weren’t enough.

That’s when Asurani appeared. She felt it right after the entity revealed itself.

She came into his consciousness without announcement, her pale gold presence filling the space between Jake’s soul and the encroaching entity like a wall thrown up at the last second before the flood hit.

He felt her there—warm and furious and genuinely afraid in a way gods weren’t supposed to be afraid—and then there was no time for anything between them because the entity responded to her arrival by pressing harder still.

It was like a tug of war between them.

Jake’s soul is at the center.

The entity was pulling toward a darkness with no bottom, and Asurani was pulling from the other side with everything her tier of divinity could produce, and Jake was holding the middle and burning.

The burning was the worst part.

His body was generating heat the way iron generated heat in a forge, the conflict between the entity’s essence and his own manifesting outward through his skin, and he could feel his blood turning into something that wasn’t blood anymore, something thicker and slower and wrong, and underneath that wrongness was the terrifying awareness that his existence was being devoured at the edges.

He felt like he was being devoured.

The distinction was absolute, and he felt every increment of it.

The ground cracked beneath his feet.

A crater formed, the ground splitting in jagged lines radiating outward from where he stood, the competing energies venting downward with nowhere else to go. The trees at the clearing’s edge bent away from him as though the air itself wanted distance.

The group went with them.

The force threw them back before any of them could brace for it.

Ankerita caught a tree trunk and held on, her power flaring automatically against the pressure. Maudlina’s barrier snapped into existence around the men and took the impact for them, the mages inside it staggering but standing.

Maureen hit the ground rolling and came up with her sword drawn at a threat that her sword could not address and did not sheathe it anyway, because Maureen Nailer had spent thirty years refusing to be helpless and old habits ran deep.

Jake rose off the ground.

Not by choice.

The forces inside him lifted his body the way a storm lifted leaves, the physical expression of two massive powers contesting a single space, and the crater below him deepened as his feet left it, the compressed energy finding the earth instead.

Inside, the entity was enormous.

Even as a fragment it carried the weight of something that had been a god, or part of one, and its consciousness was not mindless. It knew what it was doing. It pressed with intelligence, finding the weak points in his soul’s architecture with the patience of something that had time and understood how to use it, and Asurani strained against it from the other side with a determination that was costing her more than she was letting him feel directly.

He could feel it anyway.

The system moved.