Rank F Demon King

You cannot trickle-feed a ward that's already dead. Blackfen Split needed a full restore — the terrible full-body pour — and it needed it before whatever had drained it came up through the gap.

"You did it once," Yrsa said, as we worked frantically to re-cut and re-resin the ruined grooves. "The deep circle. You put a thousand-year-record amount of yourself into stone and lived. You can do this."

"The deep circle nearly killed me and it was only low," I said, thumbs raw with resin. "This one's empty. That's not a full feed. That's — that's more."

"Then give it more," she said grimly.

So when the grooves were whole, I stepped into the dead ring, and I opened myself up the way I had in the ravine that first terrible night — not the trickle, not even the deep-circle drain, but everything, the whole well thrown open — and I poured.

And I felt the Aura rise.

Here's the thing no one had explained to me, because no one had known, because no King had lived long enough at this to tell them: the Demonic Aura isn't a bucket you empty. It's a fire you stoke. The more I channeled, the hotter it burned, the higher it climbed — a bar I'd never paid attention to in the corner of my vision, filling, filling, the black power roaring up out of me and into the stone and the ring blazing to life groove by groove — and somewhere past halfway, the fire stopped feeling like something I was using.

It started feeling like something using me.

[Demonic Aura: 71%.][Warning: sustained high channel.]

The world went sharp and cold and clear. The fear left me — all of it, the good and useful fear too. Blackfen Split filled and I kept pouring because pouring felt magnificent, because the trees bending toward me were right to bend, because the thing turning up its face in the deep was a subject and I was— I was—

Get down, I thought, at the whole world, and I felt the wolf-thing drop and whine, felt Bruno's knees buckle, felt — through the Pact — a spike of wrongness lash through all three of them, Vera's voice coming from very far away saying my name in a tone I had never heard her use, which was frightened.

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[Demonic Aura: 88%.]

Yes, said the fire. All of them. Kneel. That's what the world is for. That's what you are for—

"ADRIAN." Yrsa's staff cracked across my shins, and the pain was small and bright and mine, and it was enough. I wrenched myself back — physically staggered back, out of the ring, and slammed the well shut with everything I had left, and the bar in the corner of my eye guttered down, 60, 40, 20, and the cold clarity drained out of me and left me shaking and human and horrified on my hands and knees in the mud.

Behind me, Blackfen Split blazed, full and whole and saved.

In front of me, my three best friends were staring at me the way the town of Ashlow had stared. Bruno, who had never once been afraid of me, was pale. Lila had stopped writing.

"What," I whispered, "was that."

Yrsa lowered her staff. She looked older than I'd ever seen her, and she looked, for the first time, like she was seeing not me but someone she'd read about her whole life.

"That," she said quietly, "is the thing the Wardens don't write down, because writing it down felt like tempting it." She crouched to my level. "The power isn't a tool, boy. It's a tide. The more you pour, the higher it rises, and the higher it rises, the more the King rises with it — the nature of the thing, the part that makes stags kneel and wants the whole world kneeling. Fill it to the top—" she held my eyes "—and there's no more you. Just King. Cold. Certain. Sovereign." She let that sit in the mud with us. "That's your Church's apocalypse. Not a monster that came to burn the world. A man who poured himself full trying to save it, and drowned. The first King held the line for a hundred years. And then one bad night he gave the wards everything he had, all at once, to hold — and by the time the sun came up, the man was gone, and only the King was left, and the King did not see any reason the world shouldn't kneel." She stood. "They stopped him. It cost a kingdom. That's the story under the story."

The vise closed around me, cold and complete, and I finally understood the exact shape of the trap I was in.

To stop the Unmaking, I had to get strong. I had to pour myself into a hundred and eight more wards.

And every time I poured too much, I stopped being the person who wanted to save anyone at all.

[Warden's contract: Blackfen Split — restored.]+80 EXP. Rank E: progress 83%.][Trait insight: Demonic Aura fill correlates with loss of self. Do not reach 100%.]

"Great," I said, to the mud, in a very small voice. "Great, great, great."