The world slows with wrongness.

  I stand in the center of the junction, scythe-arm extended, silver light flickering along its organic edge. The white beam from the false sky bathes me in illumination that feels like anesthesia. The same light that has followed me since Lias spoke the word that changed everything.

  Primarch.

  The designation that drew every Optimate in the Labyrinth toward my position. The beacon I cannot extinguish. The exposure I never asked for and cannot escape.

  I should be moving.

  Foden rises twenty feet away, broken bones grinding as he forces himself upright. His eyes fix on me with hatred that has crystallized into something pure. Behind him, I hear footsteps, dozens of them. The Optimates I refused to kill are finding their feet, their weapons, their courage.

  Stagger bleeds against the collapsed spire to my left. His wide blue eyes track the gathering threat with the focused terror of a child who understands he is about to die.

  Talon exists somewhere in the unreported spaces between moments, waiting for the optimal angle of attack.

  I should be moving.

  I am not moving.

  The exhaustion I have been outrunning since the trials began finally catches me. It does not arrive as pain or weakness. It arrives as pressure. A heaviness in my chest that spreads outward through my limbs, my thoughts, my will. The scythe-arm droops. The silver coating dims.

  How long have I been in the Labyrinth?

  The question surfaces without answer. Hours? Days? The distinction has lost meaning. Time in this place follows rules I do not understand, stretches and compresses according to logics that serve the trials rather than the participants.

  How many fights?

  I try to count and lose the thread: the Thrynix swarm, the corridors of bone, the junction where Raven Five died. Each engagement blurs into the next, separated by periods of movement I cannot clearly recall.

  How long since I ate?

  The Skathrith fed, I remember that much, blood rising through crimson threads, power flowing into the basin that never fills. But my body has not eaten. Has not rested. Has not stopped.

  How long since I slept?

  I do not know.

  The weight compounds. Becomes pressure behind my eyes. Becomes numbness in my fingers. Becomes the simple, undeniable truth that I am done. Whatever will kept me standing has spent itself.

  I am six years old.

  I have killed more than I can count.

  I am tired.

  The white light falls around me like snow that never lands. It illuminates without warming. Marks without blessing. I stand in its beam and feel nothing but the absence of feeling. The hollow space where urgency should live.

  Foden takes his first step toward me.

  I watch him come. His movements are wrong: joints bending at angles that suggest fractures incompletely healed, face twisted with pain he is choosing to ignore, condensed light sheaths his hand like a blade.

  He is going to try to kill me.

  The understanding arrives without alarm. I observe it the way I might observe weather, a fact of the environment, a condition to be noted.

  I should defend myself.

  The thought feels distant. Theoretical. Something that applies to a version of me that still possesses the energy to care about survival.

  More footsteps behind Foden. Shapes resolving from the junction's shadows. Five Optimates. Eight. Twelve. They move in loose formation, faces carrying expressions I cannot read from this distance. Lias is among them.

  Stagger makes a sound, small. Terrified.

  I should protect him.

  Another distant thought, another theoretical obligation.

  The white light pulses once. Soft. Almost gentle. The false sky above shifts in patterns I do not track, configurations that might mean something to observers who possess context I lack.

  Sleep.

  The word appears in my mind without origin. A possibility. A door standing open in a wall I did not know existed.

  I could stop.

  I could let the weight win.

  I could close my eyes and let whatever happens next happen without me.

  The option feels reasonable. Earned. I have fought longer than anyone should expect. Killed more than anyone should have to. Lost more than anyone should survive losing.

  Raven Five is dead.

  The thought surfaces without the grief that should accompany it. I feel the absence where the emotion belongs. A wound that has not yet learned to hurt.

  They died because of me.

  Still no grief. Just fact. Just weight. Just the white light falling and the exhaustion spreading and the distant awareness that Foden is getting closer.

  Fifteen feet now.

  His arm rises.

  I watch it happen. The slow arc of light through air. The gathering of intent in his broken body. It is a faint. He is going to blink behind me, then strike. Going to drive that edge through whatever part of me he can reach. Going to end this.

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  I should stop him.

  I do not move.

  Ten feet.

  His arm reaches its apex. Foden's eyes meet mine. I see the hatred there. The fear beneath it. The desperate need to destroy me before I can become whatever he glimpsed when my body began to writhe.

  He is afraid of what I am.

  I do not blame him.

  Five feet.

  He blinks out of existence.

  And I move.

  The motion has no origin I can identify.

  My body acts without consulting my will.

  The scythe-arm extends behind me. Silver light flares along its edge, brighter than it has been in hours, fed by reserves I did not know remained. The organic blade moves through air with purpose I did not provide.

  I am not doing this.

  The thought arrives with otherworldly detachment. I observe my own motion the way I might observe a fly. A fact of the environment. A condition to be noted.

  My feet find purchase on metal. My weight shifts. My arm completes an arc that began before I was aware it had started.

  Something else is driving this body, not the Skathrith.

  The construct's hunger is familiar, a pressure I have learned to recognize. This is different. Deeper. An imperative that predates the bonding, predates the trials, predates everything I remember about being Janus Ragnos.

  Survival.

  The word fits but does not explain. Survival implies choice. Implies the decision to continue rather than stop. What moves through me now has nothing to do with decision. It is reflex. Instinct. The animal machinery of a body that refuses to die regardless of what the mind above it wants.

  I am a passenger in my own flesh.

  The scythe completes its arc.

  Foden blinks back into existence.

  Time stretches.

  I feel it happen. The familiar dilation that accompanies Skathrith-enhanced perception, the world slowing around me while my awareness accelerates beyond its normal limits. But this is deeper than anything I have experienced before. Slower. More complete.

  Foden descends upon me.

  I watch him move. The infinitesimal contraction of muscles. The gradual occlusion of his hate-filled eyes. A blink lasts less than a heartbeat for those who experience time at normal speed. For me, in this moment, it stretches across seconds that feel like minutes.

  His hand hangs in the air between us.

  Frozen mid-swing. The condensed light that forms its edge flickers in patterns I can now perceive. Crystalline structures interlocking and releasing. Energy states shifting through configurations too rapid for normal observation.

  I have time.

  The understanding arrives without satisfaction. I have more time than I need. More perception than the situation demands. Foden committed to his strike believing I was helpless. Believing the exhaustion he saw in my posture meant vulnerability.

  He was wrong.

  My scythe-arm moves through the dilated moment with fluid precision. The silver coating blazes along its organic edge, fed by power that flows from somewhere deeper than the Skathrith's reserves. I feel my body positioning itself. Feel the blade finding its angle.

  I try to stop it.

  The thought forms with something like desperation. I do not want this. Do not want to become more of what I am already becoming.

  My body does not listen.

  The scythe enters Foden's chest.

  His eyes are closed. He does not know what has happened. Does not feel the blade that has already pierced his sternum, already parted his ribs, already found the beating muscle behind them.

  I am inside him.

  The organic edge of my transformed arm has passed through skin and bone and tissue with resistance I barely registered. The silver coating burned a path for it. The Skathrith's hunger guided it. My will had nothing to do with any of it.

  Time begins to resume.

  Foden's eyelids rise. His hate-filled gaze meets mine. For one fractured moment, I see confusion there. His brain has not yet received the signals that would tell him he is dying. The nerves in his chest have not yet finished screaming their alarm.

  Then understanding arrives.

  His eyes widen. His mouth opens. No sound emerges. The blade has already found his heart.

  I feel it beating around my arm.

  One pulse. Two. The muscle contracts against the foreign intrusion, trying to pump blood through chambers that no longer contain it. I feel the desperation of that motion. The biological refusal to accept what has already happened.

  The condensed light dissipates from Foden's hand, the Skathrith that formed it losing coherence as its wielder loses life. The weapon that was meant to kill me dissolves into nothing.

  I look into Foden's eyes.

  He looks back.

  Neither of us speaks.

  I lift him higher into the air.

  The motion is not mine. My arm rises, scythe still buried in Foden's chest, and his body rises with it. His arms hang limp at his sides. His head tilts backward, exposing the long line of his throat to the white light that bathes us both.

  He weighs nothing.

  The observation arrives with distant surprise. I am lifting a body that should mass more than my own with an arm that should not possess this strength. The mechanics do not function. The physics do not apply.

  Something else is happening.

  Blood begins to move.

  I see it first at the wound's edge. Dark crimson welling around the organic blade, gathering at the point where my transformed flesh meets his dying flesh. It does not fall. Does not drip downward as gravity demands.

  It rises.

  Thin streams of red spiral upward from Foden's chest. They twist through the white light in patterns that suggest purpose, that imply destination. I watch them climb. Watch them reach toward something I cannot see.

  The Skathrith pulses with recognition.

  I feel it respond to the ascending blood. Feel it reach through dimensions I cannot perceive, extending itself toward the offering my body has provided. Crimson threads connect what rises to what waits.

  The blood accelerates.

  More streams join the first. They emerge from the wound in braided ropes, thick with the life Foden is losing. They climb faster now. Eager. The white light catches them as they rise, turning red to pink to something almost luminous.

  I feel the feeding begin.

  It is different from before. The Skathrith's previous consumption was violent. Tearing. It ripped what it wanted from dying bodies and left the rest behind. This is gentler. More complete. The construct is not taking pieces. It is accepting an offering.

  Foden's Skathrith collapses.

  I feel it happen through the bond. His construct has been orbiting somewhere beyond normal perception, wounded and weakened by its wielder's impending death. Now it folds inward. Compresses. Drawn toward my Skathrith the way water is drawn toward a drain.

  Feeding.

  His power flows into mine like marrow being pulled from bone. Slow. Steady. Complete. I feel his reserves emptying into the basin that never fills. Feel his construct's architecture dissolving into components my Skathrith absorbs without effort.

  The blood continues to rise.

  Faster now. The streams have become rivers. Foden's chest is opening, ribs spreading to release what remains inside. I watch organs lose their moorings. Watch tissue lose its coherence. Watch the structure that made him human begin to unmake itself.

  Flesh follows blood.

  It peels away in sheets. Thin layers separating from the mass beneath like silk being unwound from a spool. They drift upward through the white light, pale ribbons climbing toward the sphere of light that is my Skathrith.

  The world goes quiet.

  I notice the silence without understanding its source. The Optimates who were approaching have stopped. Their footsteps have ceased.

  They are watching.

  I am watching.

  Foden face has begun to lose its features. Skin peeling away to reveal muscle. He does not scream. Does not struggle. Does not do anything but look at me with an expression I cannot name.

  Then that too is gone.

  Something shifts inside the scythe.

  A writhing beneath the hardened coating, a ripple that runs from my shoulder into the part of me buried in Foden's chest. The silver light tightens along the blade, then parts in places, as if it makes room.

  I feel teeth grow.

  They bud from my flesh without pain, rings of jagged enamel blossoming along the submerged length. Each new mouth opens and closes around tissue, testing it, tasting it. The sensation crawls up my nerves. Pressure. Resistance. Yield.

  They bite outward and inward, work their way through Foden from the inside, chewing toward the spine, toward the lungs, toward the dense solidity of his bones. Every crunch echoes along my arm. Cartilage gives first, then the softer organ meat, then the hard snap of rib and vertebra as the mouths grind through what held him together.

  I feel marrow draw.

  It flows into me as liquid heat, richer than blood, denser than breath. My body drinks through those mouths, threads unseen tugging every loose fragment inward toward a place that cannot be seen.

  Foden diminishes.

  Muscle sloughs from bone and vanishes. Tendons unravel. The cage of his ribs collapses inward and disappears against my consuming limb. Even the fabric of his robe frays, strands picked clean, fibres stripped and pulled apart until nothing hangs from my arm.

  When I withdraw the scythe, there is no body to fall.

  My arm holds nothing.

  The scythe extends through empty air where a body hung moments ago. Silver light pulses between the gaps in a hundred mewling mouths. Satisfied. Sated.

  A hush falls over the broken junction.

  No one moves.

  No one speaks.

  The white light continues to fall.

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