The market on Cours Edren was doing what it always did at this hour existing loudly and without apology.

  Aris moved through it with the satchel he'd found at Aldric's supply stall, the new one, cheaper than the last by about thirty coins which was the difference between the quality of the canvas and the quality of the canvas. He'd inspected it for approximately four seconds before buying it because four seconds was enough to confirm it would hold Deepbloom without tearing and that was the entire job description. The three items on Edric's list were at the bottom of it, wrapped in cloth, acquired in the order of the stalls he'd passed rather than any particular priority.

  He was on his way back.

  He was also, he had decided, mildly irritated.

  Not about anything specific. About the general texture of the morning which had been, if he was being precise, a morning in which he had been embarrassed in his own kitchen by a man who was supposed to be a priest and had apparently decided that wise counsel and making pointed observations about Aris's social life were the same category of activity. In front of a stranger. In front of a in front of Elysse de Carvaine, who was a noble, who had grown up in rooms where people presumably behaved with something resembling decorum.

  She's just an ordinary noble girl, he told himself.

  He stepped around a cart that had stopped in the middle of the street for reasons its owner had not communicated to anyone.

  She ran away from home at sixteen with her mother's sword and went into a dungeon. She came up from below Floor 40 alone and injured and got as far as Floor Six before she collapsed.

  He moved to the left to avoid a merchant's extended display.

  Ordinary.

  The word sat badly. He replaced it with nothing, which was more accurate.

  The thing was Edric had been doing this his entire life. Finding the exact observation that was both true and specifically well-aimed and delivering it with the serenity of a man who felt no particular responsibility for the landing. I did not anticipate that the first person you would bring home would be a young woman you'd known for approximately four minutes. Said to a person who was sitting right there. With the soup. At the table.

  He was sixteen. He was allowed to bring whoever he wanted through the church door. That was that was the whole point of a church, the door was open, anyone could come in, that was foundational theology and Edric knew it better than anyone

  He turned onto Cours Edren.

  The bell rang.

  He stopped walking.

  Saint Edren's bell had a specific schedule. Morning service, which Edric rang himself at the sixth hour. Evening service, which he rang at the eighteenth. Occasionally for funerals, which had a different rhythm three slow tolls with long spaces between.

  This was none of those.

  It was fast. Continuous. The rhythm of a bell being rung by someone who needed it heard immediately and didn't care about form.

  Aris was running before he'd finished processing this.

  The church door was open it was always open, the latch, the broken latch and he came through it at a speed that the nave had never seen from him before, satchel still over his shoulder, and stopped just inside the entrance.

  Edric was on his knees on the nave floor.

  Elysse was beside him no, beneath him, on the stone floor under the Architect's statue, and she was

  "Aris."

  Edric's voice. Tight in a way Edric's voice was not supposed to be, in a way Aris had never heard it be, the specific tightness of a man keeping something contained because containing it was the only useful option.

  Aris crossed the nave in seconds.

  Elysse was on her back, hands pressed against the sides of her head, her white hair spread across the stone floor like something broken. She was moving not convulsing, not precisely, but the continuous involuntary movement of someone trying to get away from something that was inside rather than outside, rolling slightly, shoulders pressing against the floor as if she could push through it and away from whatever was happening in her own head.

  "Stop," she was saying, in a voice that had been saying it for a while and had gone rough with it. "Please stop, I didn't please "

  "What happened," Aris said. Not a question an input request, fast and flat.

  "It came on in the kitchen," Edric said, and his hands were moving over her, Marionette's green threads extended and resting against her skin, doing nothing, just resting. "Apparently she hears voices."

  He moved aside.

  Aris saw it.

  The pattern on her back visible at the neckline of the plain robe, creeping above the collar, moving up the back of her neck toward the base of her skull in the slow patient way of something that understood it had time. Dark not like a bruise, not like any discoloration he'd seen in six years of clinic work. More like ink spreading through wet paper, except the ink had structure. Geometry. Not random spread but something deliberate, something that had been placed rather than grown.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  He'd never seen it before.

  "It isn't physical," Edric said. "Marionette can't find the wound because there isn't one." A pause. "It's a debuff. Something we've never encountered. Something I haven't seen."

  Aris was already taking the satchel off his shoulder.

  "Let me try," he said.

  Edric moved back without a word the immediate, complete trust of a man who had watched the person he was deferring to work for six years and had no doubts about the deferral.

  Aris knelt beside her.

  He'd treated dungeon exposure since he was ten years old. Fevers, infections, the magical residue that clung to Wanderers who'd pushed too deep and come back carrying pieces of the dungeon inside them without knowing it. He'd treated things the guild healers turned away, things that had no name in the medical texts on his shelf, things that required not a healer's approach but his the specific patient coaxing of Void, the negative pressure, drawing out rather than pushing in.

  He knew what he was.

  He'd known it before he had a word for it, known it in the orphanage at ten years old sitting with a feverish child and finding the thing inside him that could help and using it simply because it was there and the child was sick and those were the two relevant facts.

  He was a healer who treated wounds that regular medicine couldn't treat. That was the whole of it. That was enough.

  He looked at the pattern on her neck.

  Looked at his own hand.

  He'd used Repel and Gravity in the dungeon out of desperation, out of the specific necessity of a situation that had no other options. He'd felt Void's full weight behind them for the first time and understood, in a distant way he hadn't had time to examine, that there was more there than he'd accessed in six years of careful clinic work.

  He reached for it now. Not desperately. Deliberately.

  "Void," he said quietly.

  The Eido rose from his skin that settled, familiar weight, the masked featureless presence pressing close above him. He felt the merger at his right hand, deeper than it had been in the clinic, different from the dungeon. Something in the quality of Void's attention that was focused, that was waiting, that had recognized what was in front of them and was already oriented toward it.

  Aris brought his hand up.

  He didn't have a name for what he was about to do he'd never done it before, had never had cause to. But the shape of it was there, the same shape as all the other things Void did, just turned differently. Not a vacuum that pulled in all directions. A sphere. Contained. A concentration of absence given form, held in the space above his palm like a small collapsed space, dark in the way that Null was dark not the darkness of shadow but the darkness of a place where light had decided not to go.

  Void's Hand.

  It assembled slowly not the sharp burst of Repel, not the urgent pull of Gravity. Something more deliberate than either. A sphere of absolute dark, roughly the size of his closed fist, hovering above his palm, and he could feel it the way he felt all his treatments the pull of it, the hunger of it, oriented toward the wrong thing in Elysse's body the way a current orients toward the sea.

  He placed it over the pattern on her neck.

  The reaction was immediate.

  The sphere darkened if something already that dark could be said to darken, it did, pulling inward, contracting slightly, and the pattern on her neck moved. Not spreading. The opposite retreating, the dark geometry pulling back from the base of her skull, the ink-spread reversing, being drawn toward the sphere above his palm the way the Deepbloom's compounds were drawn out of contaminated tissue in the clinic, the way fever left a child's body through his careful coaxing.

  There, he thought. There it is.

  Elysse's voice changed.

  Not immediately not all at once. But the words she'd been saying stop, please, stop began to space themselves further apart, the continuous movement of her body slowing, the hands at her head loosening their grip degree by degree.

  The sphere in his hand was pulling the pattern back, absorbing it, the dark geometry dissolving at its edges as it entered the Void. He could feel the weight of it the specific resistance of something that didn't want to be drawn out, that had wound itself into the space it occupied with the patient thoroughness of something that had been there longer than this morning.

  He pressed harder.

  Not physically in the way of the Eido, in the way of the internal thing that had no muscle behind it and required something else entirely. He pressed the way he'd pressed in the orphanage at ten years old with a feverish child, the way he pressed when the dungeon exposure was deep and stubborn and didn't want to let go with the quiet absolute insistence of someone who had decided this was happening and was prepared to wait out whatever disagreed.

  The pattern retreated further.

  And then it stopped.

  Not gone not fully gone. Still there at the base of her spine, still present, still dark. But stopped. As if it had encountered the limit of what the sphere could hold and had braced against it, and the two things were balanced now in the particular way of a rope pulled from both ends by equal forces.

  Aris held it.

  He could feel the edges of his own capacity not empty, but working, the sustained effort of it. He held the sphere steady over the pattern and didn't push further and didn't let go, the balance holding, and slowly slowly the dark retreated one more centimeter. Two.

  And Elysse went still.

  The movement stopped. The words stopped. Her hands, which had been pressed against her head, fell to the stone floor beside her, open, palms up, the unconscious release of a body that had been braced against something and found it suddenly, partially, gone.

  The church was very quiet.

  Aris held the sphere for another ten seconds. Then fifteen. Letting the stillness confirm itself before he trusted it.

  Then he lowered his hand. The sphere dissolved not with drama, just with the quiet cessation of something that had served its purpose and was no longer needed. Void settled back against his skin, that masked face above his own, tilting slightly as it always did.

  Elysse's breathing. Still there. Slower now deeper, the breathing of a body finding its way back from somewhere it had been pushed.

  Then her eyes opened.

  Wet. Both of them, wet the specific evidence of something that had been happening while she wasn't entirely present enough to be aware of it. She blinked once, twice, the slow return of focus.

  "Mercy," she said, barely. Not to anyone. To the ceiling, to the Architect's statue above her, to whatever was or wasn't listening in the spaces between stone and candlelight. Her voice was wrecked rough and small and completely without the composure that had held it all morning. "Please mercy "

  She blinked again.

  And her eyes found Aris.

  He was right there directly above her, close, still kneeling, still breathing slightly harder than usual from the sustained effort, his dark hair falling forward, Void's presence still hovering at his skin in the dim nave light.

  She looked at him.

  He looked back at her.

  He didn't say anything. Couldn't think of what to say that would be adequate or useful, and inadequate and useless felt wrong for this specific moment. So he just stayed where he was present, close, the way Marionette's threads had stayed when they couldn't do their job, because staying was the thing available and leaving would have been worse.

  Behind him, Edric had not moved.

  The Architect's stone hand reached downward above them both, the same as it always had, the same as it had for longer than anyone in the room could account for.

  The candles along the walls moved in the draft from the open door.