Cold. A deep, marrow-freezing cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of absence, of negation, leaching up from her core where the stolen blight-energy now resided. Elara's world was a grey, painful static. Distantly, she was aware of movement—jostling, the rhythmic gait of a shadow-steed, strong arms holding her in place against a wall of solid, warm muscle. Kaelen.
Voices swam in and out of focus, sharp with urgency.
"—burning up, but her skin is ice—" That was Nylas.
"The breach recoiled. She reversed the flow. She took the corruption directly into herself." Kaelen's voice, closer, vibrating through his chest into her back. It was stripped of all its usual control, edged with something raw. Not quite fear. Something fiercer. "Ride! Damn the stealth! To the forward outpost, now!"
The world blurred into a nightmare of greyscale trees and jarring motion. The cold inside her was a spreading stain. She could feel it, the concentrated blight-energy, a knot of vibrating poison in the void of her being. The void was trying to digest it, break it down, but this was too much, too pure. It fought back, lashing tendrils of numbness through her veins. Her fingers, curled against the leather of Kaelen's armor, felt like dead things.
Corruption.
The word Kaelen had used echoed in the frozen cavern of her mind. A Siphon who feasts on fire becomes a living conflagration. One who drains a mind-mage becomes a psychic vortex. She had gorged on a weapon designed to rot magic. What would she become?
"Stay with me, Elara." His command was a low growl near her ear, a thread of heat in the pervasive cold. "Do not let it take hold. You are the vessel. You control what flows within it. Fight."
She tried. She tried to muster the discipline of the empty cup, to contain the seething poison, to shape the void around it like a prison. But the blight-energy was cunning. It didn't attack; it unmade. It dissolved her focus, her will, turning her attempts at control into drifting mist. A whimper escaped her lips.
"Faster!" Kaelen roared to the guards.
They burst into a clearing where a lone, fortified tower of dark stone stood, a sentinel on the edge of the Wither. The Shade-Walkers were already dismounting, clearing the way. Kaelen swung down from his steed, pulling Elara into his arms as if she weighed nothing. She was shuddering violently now, the conflict inside her manifesting as physical tremors.
He carried her through a heavy door, up a winding staircase, into a Spartan chamber that served as the outpost commander's quarters. He laid her on a narrow bed of furs.
"Nylas, secure the perimeter. No one enters. Vorian, downstairs, now. I want a full report on every fluctuation of that breach since it appeared." His orders were whip-cracks, clearing the room. The door slammed shut, leaving them in a bubble of tense, quiet panic.
Kaelen's hands were on her face, turning it toward him. His storm-silver eyes were blazing, scanning her. Her own gaze felt glassy, unfocused. "Look at me. Where is it concentrated?"
"C-Cold…" she managed through chattering teeth. "Everywhere. But the center… here." She pressed a trembling hand to her sternum.
He didn't hesitate. He placed his own palm over hers, over her heart. His touch was like a brand, a shock of pure, living power after the dead cold inside her. The hunger, subdued by the blight, gave a feeble stir.
"I am going to try and pull it out," he said, his voice deadly serious. "My magic is anathema to it. It may react violently. You must not fight me. Do you understand? Open the vessel. Let me in."
Trust him. Now, when she was at her most vulnerable, her power a chaotic storm of self-poisoning. She had sworn an oath. She nodded, a tiny, desperate movement.
He closed his eyes. His power gathered, not in a showy display, but as a deep, focused pressure. She felt it as a warmth that began at his palm and pushed inward, seeking the knot of corruption.
The moment his magic touched the blight-energy, it exploded.
Agony, white-hot and icy at the same time, tore through her chest. She arched off the bed, a silent scream locked in her throat. The blight fought his purifying power like a cornered animal, lashing out, dissolving the edges of his assault and spreading its numbness further.
Kaelen gritted his teeth, a sheen of sweat on his brow. "It's rooted. It's using your own void as an anchor." He withdrew, the pain receding to a throbbing ache. His expression was grim. "I cannot pull it free without tearing you apart from the inside."
Despair, colder than the blight, washed over her. This was it. The corruption. She would become a withered, hollow thing, a puppet of the poison she'd consumed.
"Then… cut it out," she whispered, tears of pain and fear leaking from the corners of her eyes. "The part of me that's holding it. I don't know how, but…"
"No." The word was absolute. He stood, pacing the short length of the room like a caged panther. "There is another way. A more dangerous one." He stopped, looking at her with the fierce calculation of a general sacrificing a pawn for a checkmate. "You must consume it."
She stared at him, uncomprehending. "I already did. That's the problem."
"Not consume passively," he said, kneeling by the bed again, his face inches from hers. "Actively. Willfully. You must domesticate it. You are a Siphon. Your void is not just an absence. It is a forge. You break magic down into its base energy. This is just another type of magic. A vicious, twisted one. Stop trying to contain it like a prisoner. Subdue it like a raw ingredient. Break its will. Make it yours."
He was asking the impossible. To master the very essence of the disease that was killing her.
"I… I don't know how," she breathed.
"I will guide you," he said, his voice softening into something that was almost gentle. "But you must let me deeper in than before. A true merging of our intent. It will be… invasive." The word hung between them, heavy with unspoken meaning. This would be a intimacy far beyond the clinical sip of power in his study.
She had no choice. It was this, or dissolution.
"Do it," she said.
He placed both hands on her shoulders now, his forehead coming to rest against hers. His eyes closed. "Open to me. All the way. Drop every shield. Show me the storm."
It was the ultimate surrender. She let the carefully maintained walls around her inner void crumble. She laid bare the chaos within—the churning, frozen knot of blight, the ravenous hunger circling it, the terrified spark of her own consciousness.
His awareness entered her.
It was not like the touch of his magic. This was him. The essence of Kaelen—a vast, ordered darkness, a mind like a library of cold fire, a will as unyielding as the mountains beneath his keep. He did not flinch from the chaos. He mapped it. She felt his perception moving through her inner landscape, analyzing the structure of the corruption, identifying its points of weakness, its parasitic hooks into her life force.
Here, his thought echoed in the shared space of their minds. It was not a sound, but a crystalline direction. Its cohesion is weakest where it tried to bond with your hunger. They are similar forces, repelling each other. Use that. Do not fight the cold. Become colder. Be the deeper void.
Guided by his unwavering presence, Elara turned her focus inward. She stopped trying to resist the blight's numbness. She dove into it. She reached for the core of her own Siphon power, the original, pure emptiness that existed before she'd ever taken a drop of magic. She found it, a tiny, silent point at the very center of her being.
And she expanded it.
She pushed the void out, not to consume the blight, but to surround it. To be a deeper, more absolute cold than the corruption could muster. To be a stillness more profound than its deathly hum.
The blight-energy recoiled, confused. It was a predator of living magic, not a contender for emptiness.
Now, Kaelen's will pressed. Forge.
With a mental scream of effort, Elara collapsed the void inward, onto the knot of blight. She didn't try to digest it gently. She crushed it. She used the pressure of her own boundless emptiness to grind the complex, hateful spell-work of the corruption into raw, inert power.
It was agony. It was ecstasy. It felt like breaking her own bones to reset them.
She felt the moment it broke. The cohesive, malicious intent of the blight shattered. The cold didn't vanish, but it changed, losing its bite, its purpose. It became just… energy. A massive, turbulent pool of stolen life force, now neutralized, trapped within her.
She gasped, a raw, ragged sound, and the connection with Kaelen snapped. She was back in her own body, on the bed, drenched in sweat and trembling with exhaustion. The pain was gone. The terrifying, spreading cold was gone. In its place was a profound, heavy fullness, a surfeit of power that made her feel both invincible and dangerously overloaded.
She opened her eyes.
Kaelen was kneeling beside the bed, his own breathing slightly elevated, his silver eyes wide and fixed on her. The look on his face was one she had never seen before: stark, unveiled shock, and a dawning, terrifying respect.
On the bare skin of her chest, where the blight had been centered, a new mark had appeared. Not a scar, but a faint, intricate silver tracery, like a stylized vortex or a closed flower. It pulsed once, softly, with the contained light of the power she now held, before fading to a mere shimmer.
He reached out, his fingers hovering just above the mark, not touching it. "By the lost gods," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "You didn't just survive it. You… integrated it."
Elara looked from the fading mark on her skin to the Shadow King's awestruck face. The void inside her was no longer hungry. It was sated, pregnant with stolen, purified power.
She had faced the corruption. And she had won.
But as she met Kaelen's gaze, she saw the new, more profound question forming in his storm-silver eyes. If she could forge blight into fuel… what, exactly, had he just helped create?