I took a deep breath. My choice was made. I withdrew my Essence from my palm. The great sphere of Ruin shrank between my hands until it was no more than thin whispers of itself. I let it thin, and I bent it, and I sent it inward. I searched inside the girl.
The corruption was rooted in the Sigil along her arm. It was densest there, and from that root it branched inward and upward into the rest of her. Even as I looked at it, it grew and spread. I pressed a thread of Ruin against the nearest branch. I meant to end it, as I had ended so much before it. It pushed back.
I went very still. Nothing had ever pushed back against the Ending before. The girl’s Lightning, despite its higher stage, had done nothing. The corruption met my Ruin and held against it, and something in me that had never been afraid took a step toward being so.
The impressions came, because they always came. I did not ignore it.
It was a stance, one corrected over long and patient months, an elbow moved by a larger hand until the girl held it right. A child declaring that someday she would be as strong as he was. That someday she would make him proud. He had looked at her, and he had said that he waited for that day.
Then, one day, healers filed out of a white room that smelled of herbs, one after another, and each of them had their heads hung low. He had never risen again.
I forced the impressions away. A small part of me could not help but wonder if my own generals had carried wounds like these for me, in some fashion.
Then the corruption started to creep through my Ruin. It had found my Ruin, and it was moving along it, up the thread of my own power, toward my own hand. I had not known that was possible. I did not know what this thing was. I knew only that it was learning the shape of my power as quickly as I learned the shape of it.
There was no time to call for Ash. And even had there been, I did not know whether she could cross the vow into this ring. Perhaps her Sever might have found some seam between the wrongness and the mark. Or perhaps it would only have given the corruption another path to follow. But Ash was in the stands and I had only my own two hands.
So I would not part the corruption from the mark. I would take the mark.
I channelled the Ruin down to the root. To the place where the branches of the Sigil grew out from the arm and into the body. Where they were thickest I pushed hardest. The corruption fought me for every inch, and I gave it none. I burned.
I erased the Sigil. All of it. Root and branch and the mark it had grown from.
Lena screamed. Blood came up out of her, and her whole body spasmed beneath my hands.
When it was done, I checked my own power for a fleck of black that might have ridden the line back up into me. I found nothing. I could not be certain that finding nothing meant there had been nothing.
With the root gone, the fight went out of the corruption. I reached with my left hand, and I poured white fire into the empty place the Ending had left.
The mana channels came back slowly, the mark did not. They reformed, one after another, thin and pale. And with the Cradle came its impressions. The Cradle showed me the same things the Requiem had. I had thought healing would show me something kinder.
The black lines receded across her skin, one at a time, retreating from her jaw, her throat, her collarbone. And where the Sigil had been there was now only a ghost of a mark in branchings so dim and pale I had to look to find them at all.
She looked almost like Corin before Ash and I had tended to him. I finished, and I fell to my knees.
That had taken far more of me than I had expected it to. I looked at my forearms. The two Lines stared back at me, black and white, faint at the edges and just slightly bent. They had branched into nothing at all. I had been certain that I would look down and find two Sigils where the Lines had been.
What more do you want from me? I asked them. Neither mark answered. I sighed.
Lena’s eyes were open. I had not noticed them open. She was staring up at the false sky of the Arena, and her chest rose and fell, and her skin still had a sickly cast to it, but nothing like what it had been.
“I can’t feel it,” she whispered.
I looked at her. She brought one arm up across her eyes, and she began to cry, just faintly. I did not understand at first. I had healed her. I had done a thing that, by any measure deserved-
“I can’t feel the mark anymore. What…what did you do?” Her voice cracked at the edges.
I had known, even as I did it, just what I had been doing. The girl had asked me for an ending. What I had given her instead might be the worse of the two.
“I did what I had to,” I said. “And it was better than you deserved, for the things you have done.”
She was quiet for a time. Then, so low I nearly did not catch it, she said, “Guess he’ll never see now.” Her body twisted. “Not that he would have anyway.”
I did not understand all of what she was saying, but I understood more of it now than I once might have. I said nothing. For there was nothing that I could give her, and I did not know if she deserved the giving. So instead, I asked the question that mattered.
“Where did you acquire it, girl?” I said instead. “That Essence Heart. Who gave it to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
I stared at her. “That is a graceless lie, girl. Have some dignity in defeat at the very least.”
“I don’t remember!” She said, and there was pain in them. Her face strained, and then she flinched. Her eyes, when they found mine again, held too much to be a lie.
“Very well.” I said. She truly did not know then.
“I yield,” she said. There was a hollowness to her voice now. Something in the air shifted. I could not have said what.
The Elf was in the ring and at the girl’s side faster than I could see her move. “Step back,” she hissed.
I stepped back. She gathered Lena up as though the girl weighed nothing. And as she lifted her, Lena tried to look at me. I watched her try. Her gaze came toward me and slid off. I saw the strain in the girl’s neck, and it did not matter. She was carried the length of the ring and out of it, and not once did her eyes find me. The vow had been literal then, rather than interpretive.
The Archon stepped into the ring then. He looked at my bare forearms, at the black and the white running down them, plain for any eye to see. Then he looked at the floor.
I followed his gaze. A single thin tendril of creeping black writhed on the pale stone. And then it thinned, and then it evaporated into nothing at all. He looked at the empty place where it had been for a long time.
“So this is what you chose,” he said, meeting my gaze.
“It is.”
“It will cause complications.” He said quietly. “Many of them, I suspect. Many you don’t know, more still that I cannot imagine.”
“I had expected it might.”
The old man was silent for a moment. When he spoke again his voice was lower still. “I told you once that you might have years, and then that you might have months.” He did not look at me. He looked out at the stands, at the thousand faces. “I fear you may have only days now.”
There, on the stone at the ring’s edge, lay the two bracers. A thousand eyes had already seen what they were meant to hide. The Archon stooped slowly and put them away inside his robes. He straightened, and he sighed.
“I had thought,” I said, “that you would be happier with this arrangement.”
“And why is that?”
I looked up at the stands.
The demonbloods were standing. That alone would have been something. They had stood for Edda, when a demonblood girl ranked far below a human had won her bout. But they were doing more than standing now. They were cheering. And humans were cheering with them. Not all of them, but more of them than I would have expected.
Ren was on her feet with her fists in the air. Malachor had risen to his full height, and his right head was booming something that shook the lanterns, and his left head was letting him. The girl from the arena, the one who had only ever blinked once, was clapping.
In the infirmary, Ash had said something to me built on the naivete of a Hero. Be so undeniably good that the lies cannot hold. I did not think that sparing one girl had moved this crowd. But it had been moved, still.
“They are doing more than standing,” I said.
The Archon looked out at them. “So they are.”
He looked, in that moment, a little younger than he had before the duel had begun. He raised a hand and let the Essence carry his voice to every seat in the hall. “The winner of this duel,” he said, “is Lysanthia.” The crowd grew louder. All of it thanks to the demonbloods.
“Rest, for today,” he said to me. “I suspect your time in this Academy is… limited. But that is tomorrow’s concern. Whatever comes will wait for tomorrow at the least.”
I nodded, and I turned toward the doors, and I let my gaze sweep the stands as I walked. The Marquis’s podium was empty. I did not know when he had left it.
And in the western tiers sat Ilyasviel. Our eyes met across the whole width of the Arena. I thought that she gave me the faintest of nods. I did not return it. I turned and walked.
The gazes followed me to the doors. They still landed on me. And for once, they did not feel as the gazes on me had always felt.
I took one step through the doors, and something crashed into me, and I went down. Ash was on top of me. “You’re okay,” she said. One of her hands had found its way flat against my chest, over the place where the Core sat, and it stayed there a beat longer than the falling could account for.
Sol was on Ash’s head. She let out a chirp of tremendous volume, wobbled, and fell squarely onto my forehead.
I felt briefly annoyed. Then I sighed. “Did you run here?” I asked.
“Something like that,” Ash said.
She raised herself off me, and the color came up faint in her cheeks. “Err. Sorry.”
“Ash,” I said. “The corruption felt different from the others. When I reached into the girl, it reached back.”
She looked at me. “What do you mean?”
“It followed the Ruin. It tried to use my own power to reach me.” I paused. “We must learn more. The girl did not know where the Essence Heart came from.”
Ash slowly nodded. Her mouth opened to ask.
“Holy shit, they’re on t-”
I heard the voice from down the corridor. I looked past Ash in time to see a crop of red hair duck behind a corner.
“Ren, you were too loud!” Edda’s voice carried and only just.
“I mean- look at them!” Ren said.
I sighed. I looked back at Ash, whose hand had not entirely left my chest, and I found I did not mind the sight of her there, framed in the light of the doorway.
“But today, Ash,” I said. “Today I am simply going to rest.”
Sol chirped her agreement. This time, I was sure it was agreement.