I lay on the silk sheets of the double bed in the Obsidian Spire suite.
My chest heaved and fell to a rhythm that was not mine.
The power of the Fifteenth Name—Gravitas—still hummed through my veins, a phantom weightlessness that made me feel suspended.
The aching sound of the Law of Probability still hissed in my ears—a low-pitched sound that reminded me of my current fragility.
I had accomplished a dozen impossible tasks in about half a day with the body of a frail priest who had spent his life praying only to his Creator, and the cost I had to pay was beyond the vessel's capacity.
I was back. But I was being held together by Kael's magic and the desperate prayers of Malakor.
To the universe, my presence was a violation of all known laws.
Yet here I was, struggling to keep blood flowing through the veins of a vessel that seemed to be made of wet ash and brittle glass.
"My lord…" Malakor's voice was wet with tears. He was still on his knees, his forehead pressed to the edge of the bed. "You breathe and speak again… The hope of humanity is still alive…"
I didn't answer, my eyes fixed on Kael.
He stood by the bed, but he no longer looked like the cold, precise, calculating Luggage I had acquired at the store.
His eyes, usually as indifferent as the winter sky, were wide and opened with a bright, frantic beat.
There was a certain wetness in them now, a depth that was less like a camera lens and more like a terrified human gaze.
His fingers, still stained with my dark, fragrant blood, trembled in a way that rippled the air around him.
He was unconsciously leaking the power of the Fifteenth Name.
The floor of the room groaned beneath his feet, alternately losing and regaining its weight as his human mind struggled to grasp the divine essence that had saturated it during my revival.
Now my Luggage looked less like a tool and more like a child standing in a storm, shivering from a cold he could not name.
"Kael…" I said, my voice hoarse, my throat as if it were cut with glass. "The flow… Gravitas. Cut it off."
Kael didn't move. He stood frozen, his gaze locked onto mine with a terrifying, wide-eyed focus.
A soft, jagged sound escaped his throat—a breathy hitch that had no place in a system of logic.
"Master…" he whispered. The word didn't seem programmed; it seemed torn from him.
"Kael?" Malakor looked up, sensing the erratic, sickening shifts in the room's gravity. "His Holiness gave you a command. The 15th… stop it."
Kael's hands clenched into a fist. He was shaking—a violent, full-body tremor that rattled his very frame.
"No," he breathed, the word a transgression.
He looked at me with desperate, hungry loyalty, his eyes flickering between deep, resonant blue and purple.
"If I don't continue… resistance will return… the heart… will stop… you will leave. I can't…let you go…"
"I own you," I spat, selfish rage seething through the fog of my physical pain.
"I don't take advice from my own tools. Kael, cut the flow now."
Kael made a sharp, muffled sound. He didn't obey. Instead of taking a step back, he leaned forward even further.
He threw himself onto the bed, his hands gripping my shoulders with a strength that was both forced and clumsy.
He wasn't following any protocol; he was clinging to me.
I could feel his heat—a strange, throbbing warmth radiating from his skin that matched the static of my own nerves.
He leaned toward me, his face inches from mine, and I realized he was unconsciously increasing the output of local Gravitas.
He was trying to "cradle" me in a field of zero resistance as a cocoon of weightlessness spun around us both. He was drowning in a frequency he was never designed to hear, and he was terrified of the silence that would follow if I disappeared.
"Stay," Kael whispered, his voice trembling like ice breaking. "Please... Master. Stay."
I looked into his flickering eyes.
I saw it—"contamination."
He had used his own spiritual energy for the Fifteenth Name to neutralize the weight of my blood, allowing a tiny fraction of my true divinity to flow into his mind.
The cold logic and years of church brainwashing on him were melting away by a fire his mind was not designed to contain.
He was no longer just my Luggage.
He now carried my divine imprint. He was becoming a Child of Light, and his first feeling was the most primal of all, the fear of the light disappearing.
"Kael," I said, my voice a low, dangerous whisper. "You are overstepping your parameters. You are using the fifteenth name on me without permission."
Kael didn't flinch. He leaned even closer, his forehead almost touching mine, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. He was caught in a loop—resisting the urge to flee from the overwhelming pressure of my presence, yet unable to detach himself from the stimulation of it.
"There are no more parameters left…" Kael said, his voice a shudder of trembling and sacrifice. There is only you. If you are gone… the darkness returns. I… I do not want the darkness, master. I will hold you. I will keep the blood moving myself."
Malakor stared at us with wide eyes.
He recognized the change, but his mind could only frame it in terms of his fanatical devotion.
"He… he has become attached to you. My lord, look at him. He doesn't just look at you… he… clings to you like a devotee," he whispered, almost in astonishment.
It was a nuisance. I didn't want "attachment"; I wanted utility, A weapon.