Then the Emperor Dragon's gold faded from his left eye.Slowly, not suddenly, the way a flame goes low rather than goes out, the gold retreating and leaving his own dark iris behind, blinking once as if adjusting to being the only one in residence. The scale on his left side followed, pulling back, the plates dissolving from the extremities inward, the texture of his skin returning, the colour returning, until it was just his arm and just his face and just him standing in the chamber with a slightly torn shirt and dried blood at the corner of his mouth from Dero's earlier hit.He exhaled.One long, slow, complete exhale.Then he turned around.……………..The group was watching him.Flora had both hands pressed together in front of her, the green healing flame extinguished, her eyes moving from his face to his arms to the now-absent scale and back again. Jabber was standing with one hand still at his ribs and the expression on his face of someone who has just watched something and is ta

Nobody moved.The domain had claimed the chamber, the grey pressing in from every wall, the cold sitting in the air like something that had decided to stay, the light gone and replaced with the specific dark of a technique that had its own rules about what existed inside it. The children were still suspended somewhere in the grey. The torches were dead. The only light came from the thin green flame at the domain's boundary where Wabash's vines pressed against the edge of it and held.And Wabash was on the floor.The grey spike tree had come from nowhere — risen from the domain's floor in the specific way of things that belong to the technique, growing from the dark itself, and the largest branch of it had gone through him before anyone had finished processing that it was there.Through his stomach.Clean and cold and complete.His blood dripped from the branch in slow, heavy drops that hit the stone floor and spread, each drop landing in the silence with a sound that was the loudest

‘’’I would need the body.’’’Jabber looked at the grey. At Wabash. At the children. At Dero moving through her domain like something completely at home in it.‘’’This is our only chance.’’’ Loki said. ‘’’The domain is closing the window. Every minute she holds it open, the transfer becomes harder to reverse.’’’Jabber exhaled.‘’’Alright.’’’ He said.He closed his eyes.The shift happened from the inside, a specific sensation, like stepping back from a window, like the thing that was Jabber pulling back a single step and the thing that was Loki moving forward into the space that was created. It wasn't painful. It wasn't dramatic. It was just a change of who was in front.His eyes opened and were now purple.Deep and flat and ancient,the specific purple of Loki's gaze, carrying the quality of something that had been awake longer than most things in this room had existed and was now fully, completely present.Loki looked at Dero through Jabber's eyes.He looked at the domain.He look

Her voice was light. Casual. The tone of someone greeting an acquaintance at a gathering they had expected them to attend eventually."Loki.” She said. "What took you so long?"Loki looked at her.Through Jabber's face, through Jabber's eyes, from across the grey domain,Loki looked at Dero and the thing sealed inside Dero, the thing that had his sister's flame running through it alongside the grey.He raised both hands.The purple flame came up, not the shield this time, not the protective configuration. This was different. Two circles of purple flame, spinning at his sides, each one moving in a slow orbit around its center point, the flame trailing behind itself in the spin the way something trails when it's moving fast enough to leave a wake.The circles spun.The purple deepened at the edges.And Loki looked at Dero across the ten feet between them with the expression of something that had been in a very long situation and had finally, after considerable time and considerable pa

He saw Web's eyes flick to the right, just briefly, the involuntary glance of someone who knows what's coming from which direction and that was enough, because Roderick had been in enough fights to know that when the person in front of you looks to your right you have maybe a half-second before the reason arrives.He started to turn.Not fast enough.Kyx came from the right with everything her full speed, the specific commitment of someone who had been waiting for exactly this angle for longer than the last thirty seconds. She was aimed at Web's liberation and Roderick's neck simultaneously, the economy of a move that accomplished two things at once with the same motion.Her elbow drove into Roderick's axe arm, knocking the left axe wide, breaking the line at Web's throat.Web stepped back immediately, out of the half-inch range, and Kyx was already pulling back from the elbow and turning it into the follow-through, her body rotating, the momentum of the first hit feeding into the s