Anchor went first.
Juno connected the imprint to the supported conductor while the operator beside Eli watched the manual isolation. No object fixed itself in place at Eli’s command. The talent ceased to be available for casting as they committed its trace to the bridge. The brief holds he had used until physical props took over belonged to the past now; the props remained, carrying the parts they had been built to carry.
A pressure moved through the handle beneath his fingers.
“Anchor committed,” Juno said.
The dungeon engineer checked the physical mount. She called the brace unchanged and asked the operator to confirm the junction’s rise. Eli kept his injured wrist supported. He could feel the temptation to grip harder, as if force in his hand could make the trace burn more slowly and last longer.
He opened his fingers a fraction instead.
Some of what accompanied the imprint came to him without an orderly sequence: the feel of borrowed certainty around a fixed object, an angle of attention that had not originally been his. These were traces, not a person speaking from within him. The wish through which he had received the talent had been completed freely. He had not brought a conscious dead person here to choose a second death.
