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At first, it feels like the sand itself breaks into a cold sweat, moisture chilling the soles of Lucanis’s feet. Then it becomes a puddle, licking between his toes with icy little tongues. The cracked bone in Lucanis’s big toe aches, and he lifts the injured foot flat against his shin.
The water finds the crevices—hidden cracks multiplying all around them—in the walls, the floor, the ceiling. The holes and openings squirt seawater into their cell, and Spite smells the closest one.
"Something happened. They're flooding the bottom levels," notes Lucanis, eyeing the vertical edge of the entrance. He is calculating how long it will take the water to fill up their space at this rate.
Spite knows—faster than they can claw their way out.
The tide now touches Lucanis’s calves, rising fast.
Pins and needles, like spending too much time kneeling—muscles getting cold from the inside.
His trousers are soaked up to his knees now, the crude threads of the fabric drawing the moisture in faster than the volume rises. Dry, the trousers shielded their skin from abrasive sand. Wet, they only leech the heat away faster. Spite had known Lucanis's body bare for a long time—until one of the guards brought the pants. Spite doesn't understand why Lucanis prefers to have them on, even though the finality of having their clothes stripped just makes the fear bite deeper.
Lucanis wades in a semi-circle, keeping the chain that connects his wrist-shackles to the floor stretched.
The heat-sapping bulk of the water drags Lucanis's feet, tugs at his trouser legs.
As if they needed yet another trap to keep them in.
Lucanis is already chained, his wrists bound behind his back with iron and connected to the rigid band around his neck. A red-glowing barrier guards the cell's only exit. The whole depth of the sea above his head.
A crack in the ceiling swells with moisture. A heavy droplet plunges down, and Spite loses focus, its manifestation dragged off the dry patch of wall where it had crouched.
Spite hisses at the water. After countless bruising attempts at running up the wall in Lucanis's body, it was taking more and more of Spite's mind to defy the infuriating rules of this world.
Up is unreachable. Down is inevitable. The sides break nails and snap bones if Spite tries to will the stone to part.
Their demesne is small. Unyielding. Painful. Wet.
Cold sloshes against Lucanis’s thighs as he paces through the drag.
They feel it first—a rush of pressure through the volume of liquid—before the shock of a distant implosion ruptures the thin membrane in Lucanis’s right ear.
Lucanis yelps, pressing his uninjured ear to his shoulder. The second wave doesn't come.
The blood in the damaged ear weasels into the caverns and swirls deeper inside—itchy—and Lucanis shakes his head.
The sounds lose their texture. The floor feels wobbly as if it tilts every which way with their heartbeat.
"Mierda..." utters Lucanis and leans onto the stone with his shoulder to steady himself. His heart speeds up and he tugs his chain. "Spite, we need to free the hands."
Spite snarls in anticipation of hurt, but lends him its strength, and together, they flex their shoulders and yank, throwing the whole weight of Lucanis's body and the whole force of Spite's will into the motion.
Spite roars as Lucanis’s brittle palm bones crumble, reshaping into something that can slip through the wrist-wide trap of the shackles. Lucanis grunts, his face scrunching from pain, but recovers quickly, the cycle of their hands being broken and then healed too familiar by now.
He hooks the two intact fingers on each hand behind the collar’s metal edge, just below the base of their neck. He feels the seam—fused solid with magic, too strong to rip apart with bare hands. The Venatori used to heat the seam up when they wanted Lucanis out, melting the metal and blistering the skin.
Lucanis grits his teeth and heaves on the chain that connects the shackles to the collar, but the links are thick and can hold both their strengths.
The water reaches Lucanis's hips. He sighs, lowers his hands below the surface to numb the nerves, and tries again. The chain clanks but doesn't budge. Lucanis stills, his eyes measuring the progress of the wet line up the wall.
Lucanis shivers as the warmth diffuses away. Their body doesn't have much bulk to prevent the heat from escaping, the thin sliver of fat under the skin almost gone after too much time with too little food.
Lucanis doesn't like it when it's cold. He told Spite about tar-smelling rooftops of a city where the sun rays down light and liquid warmth that gets caught in his hair. Warm. A feeling between the skin-sloughing bite of frost magic and the scorching burn of a hot poker. Pleasant. The opposite of painful. Spite wants to imagine it.
Lucanis sucks in a breath and shudders as the flood laps at their belly. Their knees ache, the chilled muscles in their left calf tightening into a cramp. Spite crawls up the side of the cell and settles upside-down on its incorporeal haunches on the ceiling, glaring at the steel links attached to Lucanis's collar.
The sharp prickling of skin signals the tide rising steadily to their chest, squeezing their ribcage like a frigid belt. Their body is shaking uncontrollably now, trying to rub the muscle fibres against each other like Lucanis used to rub his palms to warm up.
"Spite," Lucanis speaks slowly through his chattering teeth, "this might be it for me."
"NO!" bites Spite, and Lucanis lifts his head to look up. His lips are blue and trembling. "Do! Something!"
"I can't get out... of this collar. And even if I could... this cell will be filled soon."
Lucanis's gaze is fixed on Spite's scowling face. The trail of blood from his ear expands into a red cloud as it touches the water surface that already reached his neck.
"Break out! Promised! Made a deal!" accuses him Spite petulantly.
"Can't." Lucanis stands on his toes now, slowly sweeping his hands to stay afloat. "You can... have my body. When I'm gone. We can... make it fast, or—"
"Always can't!" seethes Spite, "No! We fight!"
"Okay," breathes Lucanis and pushes up with his feet. The bindings are heavy, and it takes all Lucanis's breath to keep his head above the surface with his numb limbs.
It's cold.
They don't feel it anymore with their skin. They feel it behind their ribs, as their heart pumps chilled, viscous blood. The muscles in their chest falter, fail to expand on time, and Lucanis gasps and sinks down. Spite roars and sprouts shadow-wings from their back.
The shadow limbs churn the water with frantic beats, and Lucanis floats up again, sputtering and gulping.
He draws the last lungful of air, and the chain binding him stretches taut.
His mind is slow, and the bulk of the liquid muffles the sounds, so he barely registers the faint screams that come from behind the barrier. Spite dashes to the cell entrance and peers through the red shimmer of the seal.
A Venatori falls onto the sand. An armour-clad man taps blood off his sword with a rap against his shield. A woman with ears like daggers glows Fade-green, hurling another Venatori across the corridor.
The body lands with a thud just outside of their cell.
The two strangers shout and run around the corridor.
Lucanis blinks and lets the used-up breath escape from his chest in a string of bubbles. He tries to swim back up to the surface, but the chain keeps him submerged, the air just a palm-width away from his reach.
He shudders, resisting the ancient instinct to expand the lungs. His chest burns, and his eyes widen, but the jolt of panic fizzles out without reaching his limbs.
He doesn't shiver anymore.
The agony in Lucanis's chest flares, spills into his throat and then out with the last bubble.
Spite screams for both of them—Lucanis has no air left to scream.
He looks at Spite with dull eyes and lets the weight of the chain pull him down.
His mind unravels in pieces, as if something were plucking it apart thread by thread like rotten meat.
"No!" shrieks Spite, terrified of this darkness.
Their bond spasms weakly in slow rhythmic contractions of Lucanis's heartbeat, each next one taking longer to come.
The last tremble tastes like relief, and Lucanis's eyes fall shut. His mind fades further into the darkness, and withdraws from their nerves and muscles.
Spite yells his name and smashes itself against their spinal cord. It writhes, disoriented—like a bug caught in a spiderweb.
The wings thrash. Their muscles are frozen, brittle—the fire of hypoxic pain eating away at the fibres like acid as Spite flails their limbs futilely.
It opens its mouth in a silent bellow—only for water to force its way into their lungs. The shock of it arches their body backwards, and Spite tumbles over its head, wings tangling with the iron links.
Spite coughs and retches. It only pumps the brine in and out of their body, the last remnants of heat leaving their lungs with the stream.
Icy on the inside and numb on the outside.
The ever-present rhythm of life—the comforting beat that marked time for Spite—goes quiet.
Their heart stops.
Spite jerks, frightened, its wings stirring the viscid cold. Their limbs twitch feebly—the only movement left, no matter how hard Spite tries to push its will through the nerves. In desperation, Spite anchors its own Fade-tendrils into the ligaments, and their left arm swings wildly backwards, twists—too much—and the two bones meeting at the shoulder joint part silently.
Even the sounds born inside their body are gone.
Spite puppets an empty, mindless husk. No sensation returns from skin or muscle.
The tiny nerves permeating their cooling flesh are mute.
The pain doesn't come .
Spite convulses and gags, revolted.
A ripple travels from the barrier at the cell’s exit—then another.
Spite cannot feel it anymore, but it sees the suspended specks of sand dancing in the wake of invisible waves. Two more bursts—and the barrier flickers and vanishes.
With nothing left to hold it back, the tide collapses into the open corridor.
The two strangers outside hold onto the pillars to avoid being swept away.
Lucanis's body would have been poured out with the sand if not for the collar violently jerking its captive back.
The chain tightens and digs into Spite's entangled wings, and the give it affords is the only thing that keeps their neck from being snapped.
Lucanis’s body is dragged back, dumped on the floor like a dead fish. The armour-clad man approaches quickly and stops just a pace away, staring at the ghostly bones and feathers trapped in a vice of metal links.
His shield is strapped behind his back, but he still has the sword in his hand.
He’s large. Hard to kill. Too heavy to push off. His hands look strong enough to break their wrists.
Spite gurgles and yanks its spirit-strings, trying to crawl, buck, lash out—only to flop uselessly onto the wet sand. Foamy sludge spills from their mouth.
"Rook, he is possessed!" warns the woman, edging closer.
"I noticed. We will figure it out later, if he is alive," answers the man—Rook.
He peels off a glove and presses two fingers to Lucanis's neck.
Spite spurts more water and rattles their bones—furious it can’t bite the fingers off.
Rook flinches at the tremors, but doesn't withdraw his hand. He quiets for a short while, and then looks up at his companion with alarm.
"No heartbeat. He is cold, Bellara. Maker, are we too late..?"
"I don't know! Cold is good, I think!" the woman's voice is high and hurried. "Maybe we can... We need to move him somewhere dry!"
"Got it," answers Rook, and raises his sword above his head.
Spite snaps its ethereal tendons in a desperate surge and stretches one limp arm towards the gleaming blade, the broken hand slack and the elbow straining. It cannot reach anywhere close enough to wrench the weapon from the warrior's hands. Spite gapes, wishing it could make their flooded lungs scream. It cuts the Fade-threads, manifests its form beside Lucanis and whimpers, watching helplessly as the sword descends down with force.
Waiting for their body to be cleaved in two.
Instead, the hit lands an arm's length away, cutting the iron that kept Lucanis tethered to the floor of his cell.
Rook sheathes the sword. He hooks his hands under Lucanis’s armpits and lifts his upper body, not noticing the unnaturally bent shoulder. He shuffles swiftly, dragging the soaked, icy burden up the ramp, and lays Lucanis on his side on the dry stone floor. A blood-tinged, slimy stream leaks out of Lucanis's mouth and pools at his cheek.
"Rook, do you know how to revive a drowned man?" Bellara asks. She looks around until she spots a Venatori corpse further up the ramp.
"Yes," confirms Rook. "Standard Warden training."
"Start on it straight away," directs Bellara and runs to the Venatori corpse.
Rook kneels, flips Lucanis onto his back, and places his palms—one over the other—on his chest. He braces.
"I'm sorry," he says to the unfeeling body and drives all his weight into Lucanis's rib cage.
Lucanis's ribs bend and then buckle under this deliberate force. Cold, depleted blood is forced out from his heart with each compression.
Rook doesn't wait for the flow to grind down to a halt, and presses again.
And again.
More liquid pours out of Lucanis's mouth and nose.
Spite doesn’t understand what Rook is doing to their body. It looks like harm —bones straining, organs jostled by the violence—like being beaten with a club or kicked into unconsciousness. But there is no pain to announce the damage, and Spite grumbles, uneasy.
The two ribs right under the heel of Rook's hand crack and cave in, but he doesn't stop pressing. His lips move silently with each push, as if he is counting.
After reaching some unknown number, Rook eases Lucanis's unresisting jaw open and sticks a finger all the way to the back of Lucanis's throat.
Spite doesn't have the memory of the exact moment when it was forced into Lucanis's body. It only remembers going mad—compressed to fit in a tiny object not meant to hold a spirit. Lucanis said they pried his jaw open and shoved Spite's mutilated essence into his throat as if it were an overcooked egg. And when Lucanis couldn't swallow the pulsing lump, Calivan stuffed it deeper with his fingers.
Spite doesn't know how Lucanis felt then, but it remembers all the other ways they were hurt after they joined. It remembers the choking, the stomach-twisting revulsion, and the tears streaming down their cheeks—the body's own uncompromising reaction to such intrusion.
Spite doesn't want to see it again.
It pounces on the man with a snarl, talons extended, and swipes at his throat. Back in its own domain in the Fade, it would have shredded his meat, ripped him apart layer by layer, and fed the pieces to its demesne. Here, Rook doesn't even notice the razor-sharp claws passing through his face.
He inhales deeply, pinches Lucanis's nose, and slots their mouths together.
Lucanis's chest rises with the breath that he gives him.
Spite backs off, confused.
Rook breaks away, sucks in more air, and shares it with Lucanis once more before going back to the rhythmic downward thrusts of his hands.
Bellara comes back running with a heap of clothes in her arms. She drops to her knees and takes a dagger from her belt. As soon as Rook stops the compressions, she quickly slices Lucanis's soggy trousers at the waist.
With practised efficiency, she pulls them off his legs.
Lucanis looks small, lying pale and naked like this on the stone floor.
Spite knows it won't hurt anymore , but stills in trepidation and instinctively reaches for their bond to probe if Lucanis is also afraid. The bond is limp, as if the pressure that used to support it from the other side is gone.
Lucanis is silent, and the fear is all Spite's.
Spite keens and flings itself into control with wild determination.
It lashes and wrenches all the muscles and bones it can sink its ghostly tendrils into. Their body bucks, almost throwing Rook off. Bellara recoils with a yelp.
Spite locks its glowing eyes with Rook's and expels a wet howl from their throat.
Then the breath Rook forced into their lungs runs out—and the body crumples again.
Spite has no power, no precision, no control.
It knows how to fix this. How to claim the vessel.
Sharpen finger bones into talons.
Open the ribs. Make them wings.
Flesh is flesh—it would answer to Spite. Bloat or thin on command.
But Lucanis's mind and dreams are trapped in his frame. Spite can't reach him now, can't ask, but when he comes back, his soul will suffer in a form it didn't grow in. Spite promised him: won't shape their body against his will, won't do what Zara wants.
Spite rolls out of control, its spectral wings quaking in disgust at how wrong it felt to be inside. Wet meat clinging to useless bones, and nerves that are too slack to weave Spite's will through.
Bellara and Rook don't run. The woman scrambles back towards Lucanis and wraps his belly and hips with the dry Venatori coat.
"I don't understand!" exclaims Bellara, her hands starting to shimmer as she scoops magic from the Fade. "Why does the demon not take over?"
"Maybe it's... protecting him?" suggests Rook. He lines up his arms and goes back to mauling their creaking chest.
Bellara slams her hand against the ground.
Runes flare beneath Lucanis in sloppy, hurried angles—warming magic meant to reheat a body, not comfort it.
The stone hums with Fade-charge, sending dull heat through sodden skin and into the marrow. Forced heat. Uneven. Urgent.
Spite crawls to Lucanis's legs, perches over his feet and stares at the point where the skin touches the glowing line of the Fade rune. Their body is feeling the heat.
Rook keeps sharing breaths and pressing their sternum into the still muscle lump of the heart, and suddenly—
The heart shudders and flutters in a weak contraction. Once. Twice. Three times, steadier.
When it takes over pumping the blood through their oxygen-starved body, Rook eases back, his hands still touching the skin but not pushing anymore. He looks at Bellara.
"I've got the heartbeat!" he says, his voice relieved, and he drops down to breathe into Lucanis's mouth.
Lucanis twitches. A thin, brittle filament reaches from the other side of the bond, and Spite whines and reaches back, letting it latch.
Lucanis jerks, liquid bubbling out between his and Rook's lips. The warrior backs off, spits, and grabs his shoulders. The coughing starts next, rocking Lucanis's body with increasing force, hacking out lung fluid and sand.
Bellara pushes Rook's hands away and manoeuvres Lucanis onto his side.
She rests her palms on Lucanis's bruised sternum and closes her eyes in deep focus. Magic creeps into their lungs just above the diaphragm—fizzy and ticklish. It swells inside, stretches the clusters of tiny bubbles until there is no space left for the water.
The warm sludge rushes out of Lucanis's throat and nose.
It hurts. Their ribs are on fire.
Spite winces and grunts, then lets out a victorious cackle.
Pain is good. Pain is welcome.
Their body arches and then curls, belly convulsing as if the organs inside are trying to rip away from where they are tethered.
Lucanis disgorges brine, sand, and clumped flakes of seaweed. He wheezes, and his eyes snap open.
He barely manages a gulp of air before his eyes roll back into his skull.
"Fix his head!" shouts Bellara, alarmed, and pins Lucanis's wrists to the floor. Rook cups the back of his head with his hands and holds on as all the muscles in Lucanis's body engage in discordant, agonising throes. The limbs thrash, trying to answer the chaotic jolts coming from the awakening nerves. Lucanis's mind screams even as his throat is struggling to draw a breath through the foam on his lip, and Spite folds into their bond and howls with him, in triumph and pain in equal measure.
More of Bellara's healing magic seeps into Lucanis's body, and the seizures quiet down. Spite hisses as the aftershocks make their legs twitch.
Lucanis's mind clears, and he opens his eyes again.
Disoriented, he looks at Bellara's hands restraining his wrists on the floor.
The bite of fear is instant , like the impact of a whip.
His right pupil blows wide, swallowing the iris in one heartbeat, and the left one follows reluctantly.
Lucanis lets out a distressed sound and tears his hands out of Bellara's hold. The movement shoots a jolt of pain from his dislocated shoulder, but he ignores it and twists away from the woman only to bump into Rook's knees.
The fear becomes terror as he realises that someone is holding his head in a firm grip.
Lucanis cries out—a high, aborted noise—grabs Rook's forearms with his broken hands and pushes with his numb muscles. A suggestion without the force.
A fearful shiver runs through Lucanis's body.
Rook pulls away.
Bellara speaks first in a soft voice, "We are not going to hurt you."
Lucanis's heart speeds up into a frenzy at these words. He clutches the coat wrapped around his hips and stiffens, trying to suppress the shaking that rises in his limbs.
"Caterina sent us. We are here to get you out," adds Rook.
Spite moves closer to Lucanis's head and crouches where he can see it.
"Not Venatori," it whispers into his ear and brushes its incorporeal fingers against the tufts of wet hair stuck to his temple. "Smell different. They fixed our heart. They brought you back."
Lucanis relaxes slightly at the sound of Spite's voice in his head.
He takes a deep breath, coughs, and then rasps, "Calivan..? I have... a contract."
"Tall, smug, long grey hair? Dead," assures him Rook, and Lucanis turns his head to look at the man.
A sudden tremor passes through the floor, and the sound of a distant implosion reaches their ears two heartbeats later.
"We need to move," states Rook and stands up. "Can you walk?"
"I will. Help me up?"
Rook nods and offers his hand to help. Lucanis takes the offered hand, and grunts in pain as the crushed bones in his palm grind and struggle. Rook immediately snatches his elbow, easing the strain, and hoists Lucanis to his feet.
The Venatori coat slips to the floor.
"I'm sorry," mumbles Bellara and averts her eyes from his nudity. "We had to... You were very cold, and the pants were wet..."
"It's fine," croaks Lucanis and looks down at the garment. "...can you..?"
Instead of answering, Rook bends down to pick up the coat. He holds the sleeve so Lucanis can slip in his good hand, but the dislocated joint refuses to rotate. Lucanis winces and grits his teeth.
Rook keeps his injured arm in place with a soft grip, and carefully sheathes it into the sleeve. With a few quick finger flicks, he fastens the coat all the way down, where it reaches Lucanis's shins.
Rook slings Lucanis's right hand over his shoulder, nods to Bellara, and heads up the ramp slowly enough for him to make a few stumbling steps alongside him.
When they reach the horizontal section of the path, Lucanis already pants with bloodless lips.
His pallid skin loses all the colour, his eyes becoming glossy as he blinks slowly.
Without warning, Lucanis’s mind goes dark.
His knees buckle and he sags off Rook's shoulder, momentarily throwing him off-balance.
Spite huffs and listens to their bond. Lucanis is not far. Just under the surface.
"Oh no!" Bellara wrings her hands. "Let him down, quickly, he is going to be sick!"
Rook complies just in time before Lucanis comes back to awareness with a groan, chokes and then vomits more seawater and cloudy slime.
A low rumble disturbs the dense air around them, and Rook furrows his brows. "We should go."
Lucanis reins in his breathing, braces and tries to get up on his trembling legs, only to collapse back with a frustrated hiss.
Spite feels dread squeezing their bond.
Lucanis looks up, his gaze darting from Rook to Bellara, earnest and pleading.
"I can still work! Please—just give me a moment!"
A powerful quake rattles the ground under their feet, and the shockwave that follows is so strong that Rook and Bellara both duck down, covering their heads.
Lucanis is too slow to do the same, and the dense front hits him full-force.
He shouts from the nauseating pain in his already damaged ear. Blood trickles down his neck and collar. A full stream gushes from his nose.
His head spins, and he lowers his cheek onto the grainy stone of the floor.
Rook, still dazed and unfocused, lifts his head first. Bellara peeks from under her hands next.
"I don't think I can hear very well!" she yells. "I hope it's temporary!"
"Let's get out of here!" Rook screams back.
He bends down, hooks one arm under Lucanis's knees, the other arm cradling his shoulders, and heaves him up.
Without another word, Rook turns his back to where their cell was and runs.
Spite flies above them, the thinned Veil vibrating from its exultant laugh.
They are leaving the prison behind, and Calivan is dead!
Lucanis's heart is beating, and their deal stands.