Chapter 8 · Fix It or Burn It

The blade was out. That should've been the win. Marcus held it in both hands, the frost-iron still humming from where it had been buried in the core pillar, and all he could hear was Cassian's voice bouncing across the ice plain. Don't fix it.

The words didn't fade. They sat in the air like a threat that hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet. Ayla stood three feet away, breath coming hard, her gloves scorched through at the fingertips. She'd pulled half the runework herself when Marcus's hands started shaking from the cold.

Now she was staring at him, waiting for him to say something that made sense. He didn't have anything.

The blade was about two feet long, edge to edge, and the metal wasn't metal. It was something older. The fracture ran down the center, a black line that pulsed faint red every few seconds, like a heartbeat that had almost stopped. Marcus turned it over. The back side was worse. Corruption had eaten through three of the binding runes, the kind that held dimensions stable. He'd seen something like this once in a manuscript.