I had figured that when Klasto told me that “this would be unpleasant,” what he really meant was, “This is going to be outrageously agonizing.”

So I was prepared, to some extent. I knew how to survive pain by now.

Still, this tested me. It was just as bad, if not worse, than getting the Stratagrams tattooed onto me. The lanterns flared, then dimmed. A cold white light suffused the room, building with each second. The air seemed to curdle, my body rebelling against it at every level. I clutched Tisaanah’s hand so hard that it trembled.

CRACK!

The sound was so loud and the agony so intense that I thought, That must be my bones snapping.

But the blinding white light faded. The roaring in my ears subsided. The pain faded to a tolerable ache.

I opened my eyes to a cracked stone ceiling strung with lanterns. My eyesight was blurry. Somewhat reluctantly, I released Tisaanah’s hand.

“Don’t sit up right away,” Klasto said. “You’re going to be—” I sat up and looked down at myself.

Ascended fucking above.

I was still covered in tattoos, but what had once been endless circles were now fragments of black. The Stratagrams had been shattered, as if someone had reached into my flesh and taken a hammer to each one, leaving the ink lines in broken shards rather than closed circles.

“We couldn’t remove the ink,” Blif said. “But the Stratagrams, and the magic beneath them, are now severed.”

“How do you feel?” Tisaanah asked.

Like I’ve been run over by a horse, I wanted to say, until I took a moment to actually think about the answer to that question. I was dizzy and sore, but as the pain and shock continued to subside, I realized that something was just… gone, too. A certain weight I hadn’t known I was carrying had disappeared.

I allowed myself to hope.

“It will take some time before—” Klasto started.

I extended my hand. A flame unfurled in my palm.

My face broke into a smile. Beside me, Tisaanah drew in a sharp breath. I whispered to my magic, and for the first time in so long, it listened to me. I made the fire larger, reaching it up to the ceiling in twirling dances,

then pulled it back to me in a perfect sphere between my palms.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this—how deep a part of me it was. I felt like a bird who had been restored flight.

My gaze flicked to Tisaanah. She was grinning. The sight made my chest clench. The flame intensified, casting a stronger orange light across her face.

I was capable of more than this—so much more. I reached for every lantern in the room, spoke to those flames—

For a moment, they brightened, and— Fuck.

Control slipped from my grasp. The thread of connection between me and my magic snapped. I tried to grab for it again, only to be met with an impassable wall.

The lanterns fizzled back to normal. The flame in my palm disappeared into a puff of smoke. My glimmer of freedom snuffed out.

“It’s alright,” Tisaanah murmured. “Try again.”

I did. The flame in my palm was smaller this time. When I tried to push it, once again control evaded me.

I tried again, again, and again, my frustration rising with each failed attempt.

I’d been so fucking close, and now I was being shoved back into that room of stone.

“Something is wrong here,” I bit out. “You missed something. I could do so much more than this.”

Klasto and Blif looked at each other, as if having a silent conversation. “I told you,” Blif said.

Klasto rolled his eyes before turning back to me. “The Stratagrams were only part of the problem.”

Only part of the problem? I’d had every inch of my Ascended-damned skin covered in my own imprisonment and that was only part of the problem?

“You are having similar challenges, darling, yes?” Klasto said to Tisaanah.

“It is inconsistent. Sometimes, I can use it, a little bit. Other times, nothing. There are no rules to it. No consistency.”

Blif scoffed. “Rules. Ridiculous.”

“I think what my partner expresses so rudely is that you two have pushed yourselves far past the point where rules make sense.” Klasto turned, retrieving paper and a pen from the bookcase. “You two have shared magic, yes?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I glanced to Tisaanah.

Klasto, misreading my hesitation, laughed. “No need to be shy about your sex life, darling. In fact I applaud your taste. It’s delightful.”

That conjured an extraordinarily vivid image.

“I— We have. Yes.” Tisaanah glanced at me before quickly looking away. “But it wasn’t… sex.”

I’m ashamed to admit that just hearing Tisaanah say the word sex did something to me.

“Well, that’s an oversight on your part, but no matter. So that means you were actually using your magic together, yes? Drawing from each other?”

Tisaanah nodded.

“Were you, by any chance, connected in that way when the connection to your magics collapsed?”

A pause. Tisaanah nodded again, slower this time.

I had tried so many times to remember what had happened that day. It was gone.

“Well, that explains it,” Klasto said. He drew several parallel lines across the parchment before him. “The levels of magic. Valtain, Solarie, Fey, et cetera et cetera. And, of course, this chaotic mess.”

He added a bunch of squiggling lines at the very bottom.

“Deep magic, which no one seems to know all that much about. Under normal circumstances, everyone stays in their designated stream, and we go on our way. But, sometimes, people make things complicated.”

He added two figures at the top of the page, above the streams of magic

—hilariously crooked, with massive swollen heads and stick bodies.

“You two,” Klasto went on, “started complicating your relationship to the streams. First, you started drawing from deep magic.” He drew lines from the figures to the chaotic scribbles at the bottom of the page. “And then you started drawing from each other, even though you both Wielded different types of magic. And if you were actually making use of that magic together, then you were accessing deep magic through each other.” He drew lines between the two figures, and more that ran from each figure, to each other, to each of the streams, to the scribbles, and back. It quickly devolved into a tangled mess.

“It may look messy, but this actually would have worked fine for you if you’d managed to avoid getting A’Maril and dying. But…” He drew a slash across the page, cutting through all the lines. “If something were to disrupt those connections, especially if, as you say, you were together when it happened, then it’s much more likely to affect both of you.”

This all seemed, frankly, ridiculous.

“So what does this mean, exactly?” I asked. “You’re saying that if we’re going to fix this, we need to do it together?”

“You don’t need to, but it would be the easiest path.”

“What do we do?” Tisaanah already looked prepared to face down the world. It was a little charming.

Klasto smiled. “We’re going to be a bit unconventional, darlings. I hope you forgive me.”

HE PUT us in a fucking closet.

It was pitch black. I sat cross-legged on the ground, at the center of a Stratagram, per Klasto and Blif’s instruction. Tisaanah sat directly in front of me, facing me. I couldn’t see her in the darkness, but it would be impossible not to sense her. I could practically feel her warmth. And of course, there was that scent.

“They locked us up,” Tisaanah chuckled quietly. She was whispering— the darkness and silence made it seem like we should.

“Well, naturally,” I replied. “It’s the obvious solution.”

“Perhaps he got so annoyed with us that he will just lock us away forever.”

Her voice was closer, highlighting the mere inches between our faces. I thought about how easy it would be to close the gap. Wondered if she tasted like citrus, the way she smelled of it.

Klasto’s voice floated through the air, everywhere and nowhere at once. “You think so little of us, after we’ve built such a friendship.”

“We are simply removing sensory distractions,” Blif’s voice said. I still had many sensory distractions.

“And we will be assisting,” Klasto added. “From out here.”

“I won’t lie to you, this can be dangerous,” Blif said. “The walls that are blocking you from your magic are strong, especially yours, Maxantarius. But neither of us, not even Klasto, can break those down for you. You have to dismantle them yourselves. If things get… difficult… we’ll be here to pull you out.”

A drop of blood rolled off my palm and soaked through my trousers. I’d barely felt the cut, not when the rest of me was still a web of aches. Before throwing us in the closet, Klasto and Blif had slit both of our hands and explained to us that by sharing our magic again, opening our minds to each other, we could potentially break down the barriers between us and our magic.

Did I have any better ideas? No. It was worth a shot.

This… box, closet, whatever… was clearly soundproofed with magic. I heard only my own heartbeat and Tisaanah’s breath.

I leaned slightly closer. “You ready?”

Our hands found each other’s easily, even in the darkness. Her blood was hot and slick.

“Yes,” she whispered.

I nudged open the door to my magic and my mind. Let her draw from

me.

The rush came all at once.

I didn’t expect this to be so easy. It was like burning up and loving

every fucking second of it. I felt her everywhere. Her heartbeat matching mine. Her breath growing rapid. That scent of citrus surrounded me, and with it I disappeared into her—her presence. Strong and determined. Sheer force of will.

Images fluttered by like butterfly wings. A starry night sky over the plains. A stern, beautiful woman’s face. A sneer, a whip, blood on a marble floor. Barely hidden—for a moment she didn’t want me to see it—but fear, and fear that still lingered. Her fear in the past as she thought, He’s going to kill me. Her fear in the present as she thought, What if this doesn’t work?

She resisted this vulnerability at first. It was my impulse, too, as she pressed against the darkest crevices of my mind. I didn’t know this woman. I didn’t want to show her all my secrets.

Is that what it is? Or do you not want to see them yourself?

But when I began to cede to her—when we began to cede to each other

—something between us began to swell to life.

Warmth suffused my face. Distantly, in the physical world, I heard the snap of flames. Tisaanah’s hand tightened around mine. But that was a million miles away. Here, we were falling, deeper, deeper, through a flaming sky. I looked up and saw glowing threads rearranging, like scars healing.

But so quickly, it fell out of control.

A grinding halt. We hit a wall. Tisaanah tried to push past it, but that sent pain spearing through me, enough to disrupt my focus.

Focus.

It’s not a wall. It’s a door. Open it, Max.

Before me was a door with a lion’s head at its center. You don’t want to go here anymore, a voice whispered. I placed my hand on the door.

Don’t be a fucking coward, I told myself. Open it.

Everything was spiraling, dancing the line between power and chaos. The fire in the sky was breaking, falling like shooting stars. Beside me, Tisaanah was still trying to push through, charging at the walls that boxed our magic in with everything she had.

My hand was still on that door. Open it.

But the door would not give.

The force that had formerly seemed so invigorating now threatened to consume us, with nowhere else to go.

Agony ripped up my spine, yanking me back into the real world. Tisaanah’s hand shook violently. Erratic sparks of unnatural white light snapped in the air like fragments of lightning, briefly illuminating split seconds of Tisaanah’s head lolling.

Fuck. Stop, stop, stop—

“Klasto, open the fucking door!” I demanded.

Tisaanah slumped back. The splinters of light became streaks. One struck my shoulder and left a streak of burns. I struggled to control the stream of magic we had opened, so it now rushed between us with nowhere else to go.

“KLASTO!” I bellowed.

The door flew open. Klasto cursed and threw up his arm to shield him from the fire, while Blif tried to fight them back with her magic.

Klasto grabbed Tisaanah and pulled her away from me. Her hand clung to mine with such ferocity that he had to pry it away. He seized each of our hands and I didn’t have time to protest his invasion when I felt his magic press against my mind. The connection between us was immediately severed.

Everything seemed like it got very quiet very suddenly. The flames and white light were gone. Tisaanah was a heap on the ground, still.

I couldn’t breathe. I crawled over her, taking her listless face in my hands. “Tisaanah.”

Klasto and Blif both leaned beside her.

“She should have stopped,” Klasto muttered. “It was stupid of her not to stop.”

Of course she wasn’t going to stop. Even I, someone who had known Tisaanah for all of a week, found it so glaringly obvious that she would never have stopped if there was even a shred of a chance of success, not even if it meant burning her own Ascended-damned hands off.

Her eyes slowly opened. I let out a ragged breath of relief.

“You are an idiot,” I muttered. “That was such a stupid thing to do.” “He’s right,” Blif said. She took Tisaanah’s hands and flipped them

over, revealing a blistering burn over her opened palm.

“I’m fine,” she insisted, even though she clearly had to fight for consciousness.

“None of that was fine,” I shot back.

Klasto leaned over Tisaanah, tilting her chin up to look into her face, eyes narrowed in concentration. “He’s right. You pushed forward when—”

“And you.” My glare snapped to Klasto. “What are you scolding her

for? What the fuck was that?”

“It was the best way to give you both the opportunity to—”

“You locked her in a fucking box with—” With me. I choked on the words. “You locked her in a fucking box. Where the hell were you? Why did you let this go so far?”

“Would you rather I have pulled you out when you might have righted

it?”

“No,” Tisaanah said, firmly. “I could have fixed it.”

“No, you couldn’t have.” I stood and extended my hand to Tisaanah.

“Let’s go.”

Blif’s eyebrow arched. “One attempt isn’t enough.”

Tisaanah gave me a disapproving glance, but as she rose, she faltered slightly. That one little sign of pain, no matter how much she tried to hide it, was enough for me.

“We should try again,” she said. “I’m not doing it. Absolutely not.” That was all I had to say about it.