The smell of bitter gum arabic and cold animal fat smoke was always the first thing to return. Just then, the fight-or-flight rush burned out.
Ren Vale sat on the fractured flat stone slabs of the safehouse floor, knees pulled tight against his ribs, his breath whistling through salt-caked lips. His lambskin keeper’s apron was shredded along the left hem, stiff with dried lampblack and the crust of potion-made dark oak-ink. Beneath the leather, his ribs throbbed with a hollow ache. The lingering body toll of Berserker Ren’s entropic consumption, which had devoured miles of paradox fire in the final hours of the Un-Burning War and left Ren’s own belly screaming with phantom starvation.
Every joint in his fingers felt packed with crushed slate. Across eighteen lives, he had survived by the law of the metal pen. Scrape the corrupted seal, realign parchment fibers, find the unread loophole before the court guards brought down the iron maul. He had bound eighteen alternate iterations of his soul, each born from a crossroad he had wildly amputated from his future. He had traded wealth, grace, majesty, safety, voice, and youth just to keep the ledger balanced.
Just to keep Mira breathing.
Beside him on the low stool, Mira sat wrapped in her giant charcoal-wool shawl. Her left hand—warm, mortal, calloused at the index finger from needlework—rested over Ren’s clenched knuckles. Her right arm was no longer flesh.
