Evelyn did not ask again. Her palms pressed flat between Rem's shoulder blades and the first thread of her mana entered him.
It felt wrong immediately. Not to her. To him.
Mana should move like warmed water along etched canals. In Rem, it met stone. Not metaphorical stone. Real refusal. Veins meant for energy were closed like sealed doors. Her power sought seams and found none, so it made them.
Rem inhaled and forgot halfway through.
The second thread followed the first. She braided both into a thin river and pushed. His back arched under her hands. Heat rose where there should have been cold, cold where there should have been nothing. His body tried to lock itself to survive the new geometry. He held it open by force of will.
"Stay with me," Evelyn said, voice steady despite the effort. "Do not blink long. Speak if you can."
"I can," Rem said, and the sound grated, as if he had dragged the word over a stone floor.
The effigy tested their perimeter, lens-mouth dim and attentive. Evelyn spread the fingers of one hand and threw a pane of angled force with the other. The incoming cut split and hissed away. She did not look up from her work. She deepened her breath, lowered her center, and poured more mana into Rem's closed canals.
The pain changed from heat to wires.
Rem's hands dug into the slate as if it were ice that would keep him from sinking. He did not scream. The sound that left him was worse because it was so small. His jaw locked. His eyes lost their edges and returned, and lost them again.
"Name three things," Evelyn said. "Anchor. Do not drift."
"Seam. Elbow. Spear-key," he said, and then, a second later, "Nerd."
Her mouth moved. Not a smile. Recognition.
The effigy accelerated suddenly. Evelyn caught it with a quick lattice under its feet and forced a misstep. The spear-key bit a pillar and broke it to gravel. She flicked a prism and turned the remainder of the strike into harmless angles. Then both hands returned to Rem and the river became a flood.
She felt it then. Not the pain, which was a constant like gravity. Something beneath it.
Deep under Rem's ribs, under muscle and scar and refusal, there was a pressure that was not her. It did not feel like a core. Cores thrum and glow and leak warmth into a practitioner's palms. This thing did not glow. It absorbed. It drank her mana and showed her nothing in return except a contour that did not want to be touched. It had the temperature of a room that has forgotten the word fire. It had the patience of a sealed vault.
"Rem," she said, softer now. "If you pass out, you will not wake up the same. Do not pass out."
"I am trying to fail upward," he said through his teeth.
The effigy slashed. She deflected. It pivoted, lens-mouth brightening, and tried to subtract her from the equation. She split the attempt into three lesser errors and paid for it in breath. Her rings dimmed. Lines of light along her forearms shivered.
"Stay awake," she repeated, and put her entire focus back inside him.
In answer, the sealed thing under her hands opened a fraction.
It did not accept her. It accepted the idea of being asked. Her mana hit it and ceased to behave like liquid. It became a color she had never seen. It made her teeth hurt. It made the air taste like iron. Every instinct she had screamed at her to remove her hands and flee the way prey flees the shape of a hunter it has never seen before but recognizes anyway. She forced her fingers flatter and mapped the new route like a woman writing a plan while falling.
"This will hurt," she said.
"It hurts," Rem said. "Do it anyway."
She did.
Her mana forced a passage through doors that were not doors. Rem's spine turned into a conduit and then into a problem. He shook. He ground his forehead against the slate and left sweat there that steamed. The world narrowed to ten square feet of stone and two people who refused to do the obvious thing, which was to stop.
"Keep your eyes open," she said.
"Open," he said.
"Say my name."
"Nerd," he said.
"Correct."
The effigy lunged to punish the mutual arrogance. Evelyn caught it with a ricochet plane laid at an ugly angle, then threw a wedge of cold into its knee to lengthen the next decision. Her forearms shook now, tiny tremors that had nothing to do with fear. She had been maintaining too many contradictions for too long. The cost climbed. She paid. She kept paying.
Under her hands, Rem shifted.
The thing she had nudged opened again. Wider this time. The not-core accepted her flood and ceased to be a void only long enough to reveal its border. It did not glow. It did not hum. It defined.
A contour that should not exist. A circle with too many centers. An outline that looked like absence given focus. She had the immediate, correct thought that some things were sealed for reasons larger than people.
"Rem," she said, careful. "Something is wrong in you."
"Most things are," he said.
"I am not joking."
"Neither am I."
She had no time to argue with metaphysics. The effigy closed again with the particular speed of inevitability. She split motion into mirrors and sent them past. She paid for it with blood in her mouth. Then she put both hands back into Rem and pushed.
The sealed not-core accepted the flood like a vault swallowing a river and then, for the first time, pushed back.
Rem's body arched and stayed arched. A sound left him that was not a human sound and not an animal sound. It was pressure escaping. His hands tore trenches in the slate. His eyes went white at the edges and then found the center again and then failed and then found it. He held to consciousness like a climber holds to a bad handhold.
"Stay," Evelyn said. "Stay."
"I am here," he said. "I am here."
The effigy blinked. Not with eyes. With attention. It felt the pressure rise. It turned its lens-mouth toward them without hurry. It lifted its hand.
The thing inside Rem opened.
The plaza lost its balance. The dungeon woke and then regretted it. Every thread Evelyn had laid went slack at the same time because the world decided to stop being a net. The heptagram unspooled. The ribs of petrified wood groaned like ships struck by a wave that had never existed before this moment. The slate under their feet tried to expand and failed.
Evelyn had one clear thought. This is old.
Her second thought was worse. This is hungry.
Rem moved without moving. An aura bled out of him, not light. The opposite. Darkness like the negative of illumination, and inside it a contour that made the eye fail and then try again and then fail better. The air became difficult to breathe because the body did not want to inhale what it could not name. The smell of iron arrived and refused to leave.
"Rem," she said, but it sounded like she had spoken inside snow.
He stood.
He did not stand up. He stood like gravity had been renamed in his favor. The aura wrapped him in a tide that did not ripple. The slate under his boots pitted and then smoothed because material had decided to be less. The edges of nearby pillars softened and then vanished, not shattered. Gone.
Evelyn's instincts rippled and clawed the inside of her chest. Leave, they said. Leave now. Leave fast. Leave before it looks at you. She did not move. Paralysis or choice, it was impossible to tell.
The effigy came, free of her control for the first time in minutes. It crossed the plaza at a velocity that made time feel like an old habit. Evelyn lost it and found it again an arm's length from Rem. The spear-key was gone. It did not matter. The effigy's right arm cut in a decapitating line.
From Evelyn's vantage, the cut passed through Rem as if he were fog.
Then reality updated.
The effigy looked at its right shoulder and learned a new absence. There was no arm. The arm existed three feet away in Rem's hand. He held it the way a man picks up a branch after a storm. His expression did not change. If there was a word for what was in his eyes, it was not anger. It might have been pity. It might have been nothing.
The effigy stepped back. The step resembled fear.
It launched itself toward the far wall as if distance were a solution. It struck something it had not planned on. Rem was behind it, although he had not crossed the space in a way a person could narrate. The effigy bounced off a slate that did not want to be there and landed off balance.
The world became impossible.
Speed ceased to be a useful descriptor. The effigy threw its entire archive of motion at Rem. Cuts that divided the room. Edits that turned edges into decisions. Erasures that converted space to receipts. Rem met them without effort that Evelyn could perceive. He did not parry. He removed reasons for parries. He put empty where the cuts wanted to live. He placed his hand where the elbow had to be and made the elbow admit the fact of that hand.
The floor shattered, then flowed, then shattered again. The ribs of petrified wood exploded into dust silently, then flung themselves outward because the air had been shoved aside and wanted to be present again. The chamber's roof cracked. The heart's pulse staggered and tried to choose a new meter and failed.
Rem walked the effigy backward without appearing to walk. It hit a pillar that had not existed a blink before and then did. He returned the severed arm to it politely across the face. The lens-mouth shrank to a pinhole and then widened in something like shock.
Evelyn's mouth had gone dry. Her hands were up without her remembering putting them there. She had been about to cast. She did not cast. There was no place for her spells to live that Rem had not already taken from the world.
He changed. Not in the aura. In his focus.
He looked at the effigy the way an engineer looks at a bolt that has been over-tightened. He adjusted his stance by an inch. He placed his right foot on a seam and rolled the ball of it. He drew his right hand back.
For one instant, all motion in the chamber consented to be measured.
Then he vanished.
No sonic report. No trail of light. A vacuum of presence that ripped small furrows in the air. The space he had occupied wanted to collapse because the pressure that kept it honest had moved somewhere else.
The aftershock erased slate in a clean arc behind him. Dust flattened to a film. Stone turned to powder. Evelyn's hair snapped backward. The ribs of petrified wood bowed and then turned into lines on the floor.
Rem arrived in front of the effigy and the effigy experienced contact.
It was not a punch. Punches have winding, impact, transfer. This was a decision delivered at speed. He drove his fist into the lens-mouth and through the idea of a head and out the back of a thing that had never had nerves and felt pain anyway. The effigy did not fly. It stopped being in the way. The wall behind it did not break. It evaporated into a storm that hit the far side of the chamber and took it too.
The heart of the dungeon saw the blow. It chose to die.
It did not shatter. It failed to remain an object. The crystal-rot collapsed into itself the way a building collapses into a basement it never had. The ribs that cradled it became ash and then less than ash. The breath the heart had been dragging through stone let go. Air rushed in to fill a vacancy that did not accept being filled.
A crater formed. Not from explosion. From subtraction.
Evelyn was thrown without being touched. She hit what used to be a wall, bounced once, and skidded. Sound left the world for a count and then returned as a roll of late thunder. She propped herself up on one elbow and watched dust choose places to settle.
Rem stood at the center of the crater. The aura around him guttered and flared and guttered again. The lens-mouth of the effigy was nowhere because the effigy was nowhere. The spear-key lay twenty paces away, intact and irrelevant.
For several seconds nothing moved. Evelyn's ears rang. The lights that usually obeyed her hovered, uncertain, then dimmed as if reluctant to make promises.
"Rem," she said, and this time she did not sound like a commander. She sounded like a person asking someone else to stay.
He took one step out of the crater. His boot sank a fraction into stone that had decided to be less. He exhaled a breath that shook the dust without moving it. He set his heel on a seam and the seam no longer existed.
The aura folded in. Not because he willed it. Because whatever had opened decided to close.
He swayed.
"Rem," she said again.
He looked at her with eyes that did not quite focus, as if distance had become a concept his body did not agree with. He took another step. His grip wavered. His left forearm, corrected in the last fight, refused to hold that correction any longer. It sagged a finger-width and came back with a tremor.
"Work first," he said. He was smiling, except it was not a smile. It was a reflex that had chosen the wrong moment to exist. "Audit later."
He fell.
He did not crumple. He fell like a tree that has been cut and does not yet know it. He hit the center of the crater and the crater accepted him with relief. The aura blew out like a candle deprived of air.
Silence arrived with authority.
The dungeon had no heart. The effigy had no form. The walls had no intention except to be dust. Above them, cracks in the ceiling widened and decided not to continue for now.
Evelyn slid down the broken slope into the crater. Her knees shook. She was aware of ten different hurts and catalogued none of them. She reached Rem and put two fingers to his neck. There was a pulse. It argued with her finger, but it was there.
"Rem," she said, close to his ear. "Stay."
He did not answer. His breathing came in square blocks and then smudged and then squared again. Heat leaked from him like a bad promise failing. No glow. No residual aura. Just a man who had done a thing larger than men should do and was paying the price.
She looked up at what remained of the chamber. A sky of rock watched back. Dust fell in patient curtains. Somewhere, far away, the noise of water that had found a new route began to sound like weather.
Her hands ached. Her mouth tasted of copper. She set both palms on Rem's chest, not to pour mana this time, not to wake any sealed thing, but to keep the world from taking him by accident.
"Strong body," she said, very quiet. "Stupid idea. Effective."
He did not say Nerd.
Her eyes pricked and then corrected. She forced herself to breathe in a count. She forced herself to consider exits that might no longer exist. She forced herself to count the seconds between his breaths and be satisfied with the number.
The crater radiated outward in a black flower. At its edges, the slate had turned to glass. Her reflection in it looked like a stranger.