The chant was wrong again.
Azel could hear that it was wrong, which was new and not especially useful. Serpent speak had a shape to it, a low sliding thing that lived somewhere behind the teeth, and when he got a syllable right the mana in his chest turned toward it like a dog hearing its name. When he got it wrong the mana went, spent and gone, and left him with two fingers pinched into an empty circle and nothing on the other side of it.
He said it again.
The air between his fingers folded, and Azel was looking at a knot in a tree forty paces off, close enough to count the beetles working under the bark.
Glimpse. That was the fourth time this evening and the twelfth since noon, and every single one of them had been the same wrong syllable in the same wrong place, which meant it wasn't a lost magic revealing itself. It was a rut. He had found one door and was opening it over and over, and Gryphon's whole grim little lecture had been that one door was worth nothing at all.
