There was nothing labyrinthine about putting the
Spiritual Bond
onto someone.
The System called the recipient
the
Bonded
,
which was—
’How magnificently, reductively
crude.’
It felt like calling a woman you loved
the Female
or referring to dinner as
the Caloric Intake
.
But Phei didn’t have a superior designation prepared, and criticizing nomenclature you couldn’t improve upon was the particular province of men with too much opinion and insufficient vocabulary, so he let the semantic objection perish where it stood.
The mechanics were disarmingly elementary.
All he had to do was hold the person’s hand. Murmur the ability’s name.
Done.
The Original Tongue runes inscribed onto the ring handled the rest — the attunement, the permanent
binding
, the invisible tethering of one soul’s awareness to another’s location and wellbeing across any distance existence cared to throw between them.
No incantation was needed. He had thought there would be some preparatory ritual, like blood drawn or oaths sworn beneath a
solstice
moon.
Just skin against skin and a word spoken softly enough that the universe heard it before anyone else did.
The irony of which was not lost on him.
Because it was, in its essential choreography, almost congruent to how he put the
Slave Mark
on people.
But not
exactly
the same — the Slave Mark required the forehead, the Spiritual Bond the hands, and the cosmic distance between
I own you eternally
and
I will always find and protect you
was roughly the width of the moral universe — but the surface resemblance was proximate enough to
engender
a disquietude about the recurring motif in his supernatural repertoire.
Hold someone. Say a name. Bind them to your
Sense
forever.
His life had a very specific aesthetic, and he was beginning to notice.
And not at all the same! He reminded himself.
While the Slave Mark was
dominion
, then the Spiritual Bond was
protection
. One was a leash. The other was a lantern of
gaurdianship.
The fact that both commenced with physical contact and concluded with permanent metaphysical attachment was —
coincidence
.
’Yes, it is all cosmic coincidence.’
The actual application had been — well.
He hadn’t known how to explain a certain thing to his women, who had firstly cornered him with the synchronized investigative precision of two former adversaries who had discovered, in the span of a single evening, that their combined interrogation skills were
considerably
more formidable than either had wielded alone.
They asked him about
ring
on his thumb — that plain, mirror-silver band with its Original Tongue runes — had caught Melissa’s eye within approximately four seconds of his reappearance.
Roxanne had noticed it three seconds after that.
And the
ensuing
cross-examination
regarding its provenance, composition, and the reason a
seventeen-year-old
boy was suddenly wearing jewellery that hummed with an energy neither of them could identify but both of them could
feel
had been conducted with the merciless thoroughness of a joint senate hearing.
He’d scratched his head...
...Before he held their hands.
And put the Bond on them.
They
perceived
nothing.
Exactly as he’d hoped — otherwise he’d have been standing in Roxanne’s penthouse at an ungodly hour attempting to elucidate the finer points of Original Tongue runic artefacts to two women whose collective patience for unexplained supernatural phenomena had been tested enough for one evening.
The
Bond
settled into them silently and Imperceptibly as permanent
tether
woven into the substructure of their souls without so much as a tremor to herald its arrival.
But it was arduous to circumvent the intuitions of a woman. Nigh impossible, in point of fact, when the woman in question was Melissa Ryujin Tiamat.
Because while neither Roxanne nor Melissa had felt the Bond — while the artefact had performed its ancient work with the discretion of a master thief — they had both, absolutely and irrefutably, felt the change in
him
that wasn’t about the ring but his new power heights.
Melissa delineated it first and her voice had gone quiet — not alarmed, not affrighted, but
appraising
— and the
words
she chose landed with the clinical precision of a woman who had been around power her entire life and knew how to weigh it:
Endless. Dark. Suffocating
, with a
bloodlust
threaded through it that sat beneath the surface like something predatory circling in deep water. And beneath all of that — beneath the darkness and the bloodlust — an
infinity coldness
.
The coldness of a void was after all not merely cold anymore.
Void
-cold and the temperature at which
concepts
stopped existing.
Roxanne had added — with the trembling, awed candour, she had spent twenty years in the proximity of powerful men and had never, until this moment, encountered anything that made the word
powerful
feel like a diminutive — that she felt as though with a single
snap
of his fingers Phei could
annihilate
them both into nothingness.
Them and the building and the city block the building stood upon, reduced to a silence so absolute that even the memory of sound would refuse to return.
Of course, he... wouldn’t.
They were right, though — about what they were sensing.
The
Primordial Blood
element and the
Void-Ice Element
, both of which he had recently and fully awakened, were emanating from him with the unconstrained ambience of two cosmic forces that had been emancipated from dormancy and were still, in a sense, stretching.
Getting comfortable in their new freedom:
...Announcing their presence in every room he occupied with the quiet, proprietary arrogance of tenants who had just signed a very long lease.
But while he could indeed annihilate the building with his Void-Ice — could fold it into the substrate of nonexistence with a thought and leave nothing, not even rubble, not even dust, or the chemical memory of the materials that had composed it — he was not as redoubtable as their senses were
intimating.
After all, he was just a Master.
The only reason his presence registered as
infinite
and
all-consuming
was the Void-Ice Element itself — which he held dominion over independently of his power rank, which did not require him to be a Grandmaster or a Sovereign or a God to wield at its
fullest
devastating capacity, and which answered to
Infinity Control
with the obedient totality of a force that had recognized its legitimate sovereign and would not be diminished by the constraints of a power ranking system it predated by several aeons.