After Skye slipped away into the night, Rhine returned to the cramped house he’d rented in the Outer Ward.
Haizan was already there.
Or rather—”Lannis” was.
The troll sat in the chair by the window like he belonged there, golden armor stacked neatly in a corner, cloak folded with the kind of discipline that didn’t match his size.
Rhine shut the door behind him. “Report.”
Haizan looked up. In the lamplight, the knight commander’s face was flawless. Too flawless. A perfect mask over something that didn’t breathe like a man.
“The revival went smoothly,” Haizan said. “Most of the key posts inside Windrest Keep are ours now. The guards. The messengers. Even the men who turn the keys.”
Rhine’s expression didn’t shift. “And the real Lannis?”
Haizan’s eyes gleamed. “A spy. The King’s.”
Rhine paused.
Haizan continued, voice low. “He was sent here to dig up the governor’s hidden list. The names of agents Panglos planted in the Crown’s network.”
So the King had been circling Panglos for a while. Rhine shouldn’t have been surprised.
He drummed his fingers once on the table. “Don’t kill him.”
Haizan frowned—an expression that looked almost comical on a borrowed human face. “You want me to keep feeding him lies?”
“I want you to feed him something that hurts Panglos,” Rhine said. “Let him report that Panglos is working with Marsas. That they’re close. That they’re hiding something demigod-sized.”
Haizan’s grin returned. “Understood.”
Rhine pulled a small spiral shell from his pocket—a merfolk conch no bigger than a thumb, etched with faint, living patterns.
“Use this if you need me,” he said, tossing it over.
Haizan caught it with two fingers. “Good. I don’t like shouting across rooftops.”
Rhine’s eyes sharpened. “Keep Delanna and Eira safe. That’s still the priority.”
Haizan dipped his head. “As you command.”
…
Deep beneath Windrest Keep, the air was wet and cold.
Panglos Fell stood amid a graveyard of shattered brick and scorched stone, the ruins of his hidden basement still smoking at the edges. The blood pool—his altar, his engine—had been blown apart into a crust of blackened sludge.
Marsas climbed down the broken steps like a man descending into his own nightmare.
He saw it.
His body.
Or what was left of it.
A mangled corpse lay wedged in the rubble—bones exposed, flesh torn, limbs twisted at impossible angles. The head was half-crushed, as if something enormous had stepped on it without even noticing.
Marsas made a sound that wasn’t quite human.
He threw himself forward, clawing at debris, digging with bare hands until his nails split.
“No… no, no, no…”
He needed the body. Without it, everything they’d done—every sacrifice, every experiment—would rot into nothing.
He tried to call to his apprentices.
No answer.
Not one.
The silence in the basement felt thicker than the dark.
Marsas froze, then stumbled through the wreckage toward the side corridor.
There were bodies there too.
His students. His assistants. Every last one of them.
They weren’t simply killed.
They were… erased. Like their lives had been snuffed out by something that didn’t bother with cruelty. Something that just removed obstacles.
Marsas’s throat worked. “They’re all dead…”
A laugh echoed in his skull—not in the room.
Panglos.
“You’re still breathing,” the governor’s voice said inside his mind. “So stop whining.”
Marsas’s eyes burned. “My body is destroyed!”
“And yet you’re still here,” Panglos replied. “Because I changed the rules.”
Marsas trembled. He remembered it now—the moment the world tore open, the moment their souls had fled into the stone like smoke, hiding inside the wall while disaster raged overhead.
Panglos continued, pleased with himself. “A Godhead is authority. Even half of one can bend the line between life and death.”
Marsas’s mangled corpse suddenly twitched.
Bone ground against bone. Flesh crawled. The shredded ribs knitted together as if pulled by invisible threads.
Marsas felt himself being dragged—pulled back into meat.
His vision snapped into place.
Cold flooded his lungs.
He coughed, then sucked in a breath that tasted of blood and soot.
He was alive.
His body lay whole again, skin sealing over bruised muscle, cracked joints smoothing as the half-Godhead’s power stitched him back together.
Marsas stared at his hands, shaking. “This… this is…”
“Regeneration,” Panglos said. “And it costs.”
Marsas swallowed. “Because it’s only half.”
“Because it’s tainted,” Panglos corrected. “And because it’s incomplete.”
Marsas’s breathing steadied. Ambition replaced shock. “Then we get the other half.”
Panglos’s presence pressed against his thoughts like a blade. “We will. With your alchemy and my resources, we’ll pry it out of the world.”
Marsas’s lips curled. “And Rhine?”
Panglos’s answer was simple.
“We cut him open.”
…
By the time Delanna returned, dusk had already painted the broken rooftops in bruised purple.
She handed Rhine a small vial sealed with wax. Inside, the liquid shimmered pale, like moonlight trapped in glass.
“A purification draught,” she said quietly. “Old recipe. Real old.”
Rhine turned the vial in his fingers. “Where did you get this?”
Delanna’s voice dropped even further. “It was used centuries ago—by a black dragon crown prince. He fell for a mermaid. The taboo magic nearly ruined him.”
Rhine’s gaze lifted. “And this saved him?”
“It purged the taint,” Delanna said. “But it took everything else with it.”
Rhine didn’t like the way the room suddenly felt smaller.
Delanna met his eyes. “If you drink it, the corruption in you will be gone.”
“And the price?”
“You lose your supernatural power,” she said. “All of it. You become ordinary again.”
The vial’s pale glow trembled between Rhine’s fingers.
Outside, the wind rattled loose boards in the ruined street, like something knocking—patient, insistent, waiting to be let in.