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And then …

There’s a disturbance in the night sky. Nothing visible to ordinary sight, but to me? To me, it’s as visible as the moon. A shadow moving against the backdrop of stars, flying with purpose directly toward me.

My heart pounds against my ribs. After all the silence, all the years apart, my familiar approaches.

The shadow-raven takes form as it descends, its wings spanning wider than any natural bird. Its body is made of concentrated darkness—no feathers, no flesh, only force. It pulls the night into itself, consuming light from the stars as it passes. Its eyes burn with cold fire as it circles once overhead. In that instant, I feel it again. The bond.

My breath stills. My arms shake. The void pulses with desperate hunger. It is no longer waiting. It is coming for me.

Mine again.

It whirls and dips, then tucks its wings close to its body and plummets toward me. I brace for impact, but there is none. Instead, it dissolves on contact, transforming into liquid shadow that flows over my skin, soaking through clothing, through flesh, directly into my being.

Cold fire floods my veins—not burning, butfilling. I gasp as the breath leaves me, spine arching backward until I think it might snap. My jaw locks open in a silent scream as my familiar drives deeper, piercing past muscle and marrow. My vision blurs, then fractures. The stars above shatter into fragments as darkness consumes me from within.

This is not merely pain or pleasure, but both extinction and rebirth. A complete reordering of who and what I am.

I collapse to my knees, then fold forward, arms locked around my ribs, fingernails digging crescents into my own flesh until blood wells beneath them. The familiar reintegrates with singular purpose, restoring what was lost, reclaiming its place with ruthless focus.

Every cell in my body feels flayed open, exposed, as my familiar scrapes against the inside of my skin. I bite down against a scream as my ribs strain outward, making room for something vast compressed into human form. My teeth crack against each other, the taste of iron flooding my mouth.

The boundaries between us blur, then vanish. We are separate and one, individual and unified. The contradiction makes perfect sense in ways language cannot capture.

Memories not my own crash through me—a torrent of experiences from eyes that have watched the world while I sat motionless in a tower.

The raven watching, helpless, as the Authority bound me. My final command. The severing of our connection. The tower closing.

Then movement, endless flights across desert and mountain, searching for allies who might help free me. But no one couldsee it for what it was. No one could hear. It was form without identity. Substance mistaken for omen.

Countless attempts to breach the tower’s defenses, each one ending in failure. The Authority’s purges escalating. Veinbloods hunted, exposed, erased. And without me, no one left to shield them.

Until eventually, it faded from sight, endured the silence, became a myth.

A cry breaks free—not a human sound, but void given voice. Darkness rips outward from my kneeling form as the familiar resumes its place within me. The ground beneath me freezes, frost patterns lacing the stone in intricate whorls as cold fire continues to surge through my body.

It seeps inward, tracing through veins, threading along bone. No longer foreign, no longer separate. It marks me—lines that rise like ink under pressure, shapes that shift, then settle. What might seem like tattoos are nothing so fixed. They move. They breathe. They map themselves across my chest, down my arms, along my spine—living force returning to where it belongs.

The emptiness disappears. Weight takes its place. Presence.Totality. Where there was fractured awareness, now exists perfect unity. Where power hesitated, now it obeys without resistance.

I remain kneeling, panting with the force of return, and allow myself this moment of vulnerability that no one will ever witness. My familiar’s consciousness merges with mine. Two halves aligning, memories coalescing, nothing lost between us.

When I finally rise, I do so with nothing withheld. It stirs beneath the surface—attentive, aligned, waiting for command. But more thanthat, through my familiar, I see from above. I feel the world from altitude. Currents. Movement. Threads of heat and intent. The shape of danger before it arrives.

I send the raven out. It bursts from my chest, fully formed, wings silent as it climbs into the night sky. Its vision threads back to me as it flies.

I am no longer alone in my body. And I am not only on the ground.

Nocturnal creatures move through the foothills, following jagged, uncertain hunting patterns.

Further off, the nomad settlement continues its evening rituals, its people gathering around fires that flicker like distant pinpricks of light.

There’s an Authority patrol camped for the night near the desert’s edge. Eight soldiers with sandstriders. All but one is asleep. None are aware that the thing they sealed away now moves through the dark less than two miles from their fire.

They don’t see me. And if I willed it, I could stop their hearts, one by one, leaving only cooling bodies for the desert scavengers to find at dawn, so they would not see anything again.

I test the limits of my restored power, drawing force from increasingly distant sources. They respond without delay, streaming toward me like current down a slope, shaping themselves at the slightest shift in thought. The dark does not just gather. Itlistens.

The night twists at my command, shaping into a crown of thorns, a blade, a ring. Each form hovers for two beats of my heart beforedissolving. Power coils through me, alive now. There is no resistance. No delay. With the return of my familiar, I am almost complete.