Two divine tethers pulsed in his mind. He held them in a fragile, empathic balance—a silent negotiation between two wounded titans that made his headache throb. One was a vortex of traumatized confusion from the Gem-Croc; the other, a current of weary, pained duty from the Armored Dog.

  The Gem-Croc’s immense flank rose and fell with a deep, rhythmic tremor, a mountain range of sated muscle and scale. In the lee of its flank, the Armored Dog lay in a tight curl, the firelight gleaming on the plates of its white armor. A massive bandage, made of Almitad’s old bedroll, was cinched around its wounded shoulder.

  Trenn felt the great dog’s steady breathing, a quiet counterpoint to the Gem-Croc’s deeper rumble, and knew the truce held only as long as his focus did.

  Above, Bomber’s wings were a faint, steady beat against the perpetual grey sky, a solitary sentinel on an endless watch. At the center of the small camp, the fire crackled, its warmth a fragile defense against the chill of the grassland. Skate rested near the embers, its obsidian surface reflecting the dancing flames.

  Nearby, Zeen was carving Trenn’s bat, while Mara tended to Ezy. She was propped against a large, smooth rock, her face pale and slick with sweat. She had lost consciousness while Zeen had attempted first aid.

  His sonar painted the scene nearby with grim clarity. He registered the tight, dense wrap of a bandage below Ezy’s knee, where her thin leg now ended. Near her propped form, his sonar mapped the shapes of a splitting axe, a section of Husk exoskeleton, and two pieces of the dog god’s armor. The axe head, a dense node of metal, still vibrated with the residue of dried blood.

  Mara’s tether pulsed with a hunter’s focused calm. His sonar tracked the precise, minimal vibrations of her movements as she worked over the bandage, each motion efficient and stripped of waste.

  Zeen’s tether pulsed with desperate, frantic energy, the polar opposite of Mara's calm focus. It was a psychic scream for distraction, a mind trying to outrun the tidal wave of grief from what he had been forced to do to Ezy. His grief was focused on the one thing he could control: work.

  “So you want me to make it short enough to be used in one hand?” Zeen asked, his voice a low monotone. “We need to come up with the final design now that we have the White Metal.”

  Trenn felt the question not as an interruption, but as a lifeline. It was a craftsman's plea for a problem to solve, a tangible task to anchor him against the horror of Ezy’s pained moans and his own hollowing loss.

  His focus remained on Almitad’s slumped skeleton. He was kneeling in front of her, with a sack of chitin-flecked bones lying open on the grass.

  “I can’t swing a baseball bat properly when I’m missing two fingers off my guiding hand,” he answered, his voice quiet.

  He returned to comparing various bone pieces to Almitad’s broken ribs, giving them both a problem to solve. He was trying to find the best fit in what could only be described as a patchwork rather than actual repairs.

  The right side of her thoracic cage was a ruin, a gaping hole where glowing, runescribed ribs should have been. The discordant hum leaking from the break reminded him of the sound of a failing machine.

  Within the fractured cage, the undead Mana Bloom pulsed weakly, its light a faint, dying ember. It only had a few petals left.

  With his good hand, Trenn reached into the sack beside him and pulled out a long, curved piece of bone, still flecked with dried haemolymph. He offered the gruesome puzzle piece to the tear in Almitad’s chest.

  Her skull turned, her empty sockets tracking his clumsy attempt to find a match amongst the splintered ends of her own glowing ribs.

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  He angled the bone, rotated it, his brow furrowed in concentration. The scavenged piece was a slightly different shade, a stark, mundane white against the runic glow of her own frame.

  He found a spot for it. The curve didn’t match her ribs. It protruded haphazardly outwards, but it was the right length and appropriate width.

  Almitad’s free hand lifted, her bony fingers trembling with effort. She twitched them once.

  A thin, black thread wrapped around both sides of the broken rib, pulling the scavenged bone into place and lashing it tight with a gangrenous knot. The effort caused the necrotic bloom in her chest to dim.

  Trenn had never been so close to the bloom for so long, watching Almitad tighten black threads around her bones.

  The necrotic mana flowing from the bloom wasn't just a power source; it had a frequency. He’d been listening to its hum, to the static produced by the break in its bone cage. The pitch was familiar now.

  It was an unsound, a discordant vibration of pure stillness that sought to cancel out all others. Where his own soul hummed with a chaotic, living energy, this was a clean, cold chord of finality. It was the frequency of entropy itself, and every instinct in his living body screamed at him to reject it.

  Lady Yradone's voice echoed in his memory. “Invite. Match its pitch.”

  He held the bone against the break in her cage. As Almitad’s fingers began to weave another necrotic thread, Trenn forced himself to stop resisting the alien frequency. He didn't just invite the cold; he surrendered to it.

  A profound chill settled not on his skin, but in the marrow of his bones, a feeling of absolute stillness that felt like drowning in ice. The two frequencies warred within him, a nauseating psychic friction that made the fluid in his ears feel as though it were boiling.

  His own life-force recoiled from the intrusion, a panicked retreat from the encroaching void. A tremor ran through his frame, his teeth chattering from a cold that was not physical.

  Just as Almitad’s thread was about to complete its knot, Trenn refocused through the internal chaos. A dark, pragmatic curiosity overrode his body's revulsion.

  He stopped trying to force his Mana Radiation to the tune of death. That was a direct conflict, a rejection of his own nature.

  Instead, his mind, trained to analyze and deconstruct, sought a different path. He found the silent spaces between the notes of his own hum, the brief moment between heartbeats.

  He tried to harmonize the two. He filled the silent spaces between the notes of his own hum with the cold chord of finality.

  The two frequencies existed in a fragile, terrible harmony. He felt a click, a temporary alignment, a notch of strange coldness upon which he could hang his will.

  He channeled that dissonant chord into his fingers. It was not a clean flow of power, but a leaking, unstable current that felt like holding a live wire wrapped in ice.

  His living body rejected the foreign power. He did not release the Necrosis Element; it was violently expelled from him. The psychic recoil threw his head back. A sharp pain lanced behind his eyes as a single, dark drop of blood welled from the corner of his right eye and traced a path down his cheek.

  He flinched, a full-body shudder of revulsion washing through him as the living warmth of his body rushed back to his extremities. His hold on the two divine tethers slackened, the fragile truce threatening to shatter.

  A sudden spike of territorial aggression lanced through the Armored Dog’s tether. The god’s massive head lifted from its paws, a low growl rumbling in its chest as its gaze fixed on the unnatural glow of Almitad’s skeleton.

  Trenn immediately pushed a wave of soothing calm down the bond, a focused projection of safety and shared purpose. The growl subsided. The great dog’s head settled back onto its paws with a heavy, resigned sigh, and the mental effort sent a fresh throb of pain through Trenn's temples.

  The necrotic mana had been horrifying, but it was also a key. He thought of Mara's tether to the Mana Forest, the ancient bond that kept her prisoner. He thought of the One-Eye, the parasitic soul latched onto a stolen body.

  Tethers of belonging. Those he knew how to manipulate and how to break.

  But soul tethers had remained a mystery.

  Gil's spirit, bound to Zeen's musket. Almitad's own soul, tethered to her bones. A chilling, logical connection snapped into place in his mind. Necromancy was not just about reanimating corpses; it was the missing link to the binding and unbinding of souls.

  Almitad’s skeletal frame became rigid. Her skull snapped toward him, her empty sockets fixed on his hand. Inside her shattered chest, the undead Mana Bloom flared with a single, violent pulse of black-green light.

  “You’re becoming a necromancer, Trenn.”

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  Wednesday, November 12th, at 15:35 EST.