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Something that went beyond memories he didn’t want in his head, beyond the fear of madness and imprisonment—something that kept accelerating with every frantic beat of his heart.

The tightness in his chest turned agonizing. A thousand razor-sharp edges spun inside him, his breath catching as fire flooded his veins.

Ivain knelt beside him. “Skylen, listen to me. I need you to focus. Can you do that?”

Skye, struggling to catch his breath, nodded weakly.

Ivain pulled a dagger from inside his coat—the small silver blade he always carried in polite company. He ran it over hispalm. Blood welled, and Skye knew to drink when it was offered. Magic was dangerous. It wasn’t unusual for a teacher to step in. Preventing students from accidentally killing themselves tended to be part of the job.

The tang of metal and magic was familiar. On the first swallow, the old man’s aether was already feathering out, seeking, searching.

“I suppose I ought to have known better, shouldn’t I?” Ivain muttered. “To think it would only beherantics I’d be navigating. But you…” He laughed grimly. “I forgot! Where one goes, so does the other.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“No, you’re not.”

Skye couldn’t bring himself to argue as the tingle of foreign aether suffused his body.

“You forced my hand,” Ivain murmured. “I told youno. I warned you—bloodcrafting is dangerous, and there’s no easy way back. I tried tosave you, and what do you go and do? Collaborate with your future self to hold a gun to your own head. Now, if I don’t at least teach you how to manage everything you’ve pumped into yourself, you’ll die.”

Aether moved through Skye like probing fingers, cold and methodical.

“All that liquid silver, the shadow essence, hell, is that… yes. That right there—that’s adamantine. Apparently, you wanted to make yourself impervious.”

Skye gritted his teeth, groaning as sharp blades spiraled under his skin.

“It’ll trickle out of all the nooks and crannies where you’ve stashed it, forming blockages in your veins like clogged pipes.”

With that understanding, the ache in Skye’s chest finally made sense, each heartbeat scraping against his arteries. The rarest metals, elemental essences, and alchemical ingredients hewould need to mold and shape his body—it was exactly what his other-self had promised him. And now it was shredding him from the inside.

“Alright,” Ivain said, his voice a low, steady anchor. “You pumped yourself full of metal and magic essence, and now it’s all coming out of solution. So, what we’re going to do is gather everything back up. It’s just like the precision drills, Skye. Feel your aether—use it to map your body. The parts that are you, and the parts that aren’t. Like this.”

Ivain’s magic moved against the current of his own, guiding him—showing him how to comb the stray elements and pull them into order. Each splinter of metal was caught, wrapped in aether, and drawn into a smooth procession. The essence followed, pulled back into solution and coaxed into alignment.

The pain began to recede. So did the retching. Enough that Ivain finally pulled Skye away from the toilet to lean against the wall.

There was blood on Skye’s mouth. He could taste it. He could feel the sharp edges of the metals that had sliced his throat.

Ivain said, “I’m assuming you’re aware there’s an aether core fused into your spine?”

No, but that would explain the throbbing between his shoulders.

“Or something like it…” Ivain’s magic flickered along his vertebrae, probing at the thing embedded there—testing it like fingers tapping gently at a sealed door.

The response was immediate—a deep pulse of pressure that radiated outward. Skye’s whole body jerked.

“This isn’t standard,” Ivain murmured. “Aether cores used to be a common power source—I’ve got three welded into me. We called them crawlies because of how they feel when they burrow. But this… How long ago did the surgery occur?”

“About four hours,” Skye rasped.

“Amazing… I’m detecting connectivity with almost every major organ system. Any strong burst of emotion would trigger it. If you’re looking for the reason you turned that man to goo and organs, I’d say we found it.”

Relief hovered just out of reach, too precarious to settle. “So, I’m not going mad yet?”

Ivain huffed a laugh. “The bloodcrafter’s ‘madness’is the unfortunate result of a few idiots who decided it would be a good idea to‘optimize’their brains beyond simply tweaking their reflexes or perception. They cut directly into those parts responsible for personality, morals, inhibition. It was arrogance in its truest form, and we’ve all borne the punishment. Seeing as you still have a full head of hair and an intact skull, I think it’s safe to assume that,no—you are not succumbing to madness, merely the consequences of a flawed decision-making paradigm.”

Skye’s pulse finally slowed. The worst of the pain faded, but his blood still felt too thick, burning with everything coursing through it.