Page 25 of The Shattered Rite
She convulsed, fingers clawing at blood-slick stone, her breath stuttering like something broken.
“I’m dying,” she rasped.
No. You are becoming.
Her body betrayed her last. Her vision split with silver, her skull cracked open by a pain not even nerves were built to carry.
She heard herself beg, though she didn’t know who to.
“Please. Please, no more.”
Then everything went silent.
The pain wasn’t gone. It simply… ceased to matter.
She tasted it on her tongue—not blood. Not ash.
Starlight.
She collapsed to the stone, trembling, hollow, her heart barely beating.
Her next breath was like dragging air into a body that wasn’t hers anymore.
Symbols burned beneath her skin.
Not ink. Not scars.
Living script.
She turned her hands numbly, watching lines of molten silver coil around her fingers—talon-shaped runes flexing as she moved. Spirals of sacred geometry looped her ribs and throat. Her collarbones glimmered beneath skin stretched too thin, veins lit from within.
Her voice came raw. Quiet.
“What… what did you do to me?”
Vaeronth’s shadow loomed, vast and certain.
I did nothing.
“You’re joking.”
The runes along her forearms pulsed—answering her anger.
You called. I answered.
“I didn’t call for this.”
You did.
Her knees buckled.
Her ruined armor cracked, splintered, then fell away in glittering fragments. She looked down as the plates disintegrated at her feet like a serpent shedding its skin.
And beneath it…
A second skin. Scaled sigils. Glimmering script. A body no longer entirely human.
She pressed her palm to her own arm, then drew it back like she’d touched flame.
