There is something inside the moment, inside the shift that Corinth takes me on, flinging me across the world to land softly once again in the penthouse he gifted me. Warm air buffets me as we come into being out on the balcony. The night air in Faeth is warmer than the day in Grim, something about the barrier around the city trapping in the warmth. The balcony groans beneath the sudden weight of three people appearing on it at once, but other than the sound, it doesn’t so much as shudder.

  “Back home,” Dovik says. The irony in his words is bitter, but he forces a smile anyway, pushing open the glass door that leads into the apartments. “Thank you for the swift return, Mr. Devardem.”

  “Corinth, if you like,” Corinth says to him.

  “Of course.” Dovik nods before stalking into the dark of the room beyond the glass. Those few words are the only thing I have heard him say in the last few days. My brother and I watch him go, lingering out in the fresh air as he slips away like a ghost. A few seconds later, the door to his room slams closed.

  Corinth looks back at me with concern, as if I am the one who needs consoling. “This is always awkward, isn’t it?”

  “At least he is being pleasant,” I reply.

  The balcony doors close with a rasp behind us as we move into the room. At a gesture, Corinth lights the place, activating the switches on the wall that control the interior lights. Then, we just stand there, Corinth with his hand in his pocket, and me trying to pop an ache in my back by stretching my arms behind me.

  “Show off,” Corinth says after I finally get it.

  I look at my brother. “You probably don’t get cricks in your back anymore.”

  “I do on occasion,” he says.

  “Sounds like you didn’t do a very good job designing your body then.”

  He snorts at that. “I was in a bit of a rush. I suggest taking your time with it.”

  “Right.”

  “Actually.” Corinth holds out his hand. A thick book that looks older than every tree in our orchard falls into it from nowhere. “You reminded me that I should give this to you.”

  I take the offered book when he hands it to me, popping open the first page and skimming through. Galea appears at my shoulder, beginning her memorization of the words as I absently turn the pages. “Body tempering?” I ask.

  “It is a compendium with a few different examples and techniques. There were a few years that I spent trying to get my hands on all the spells a few temples, libraries, and ancient families were hoarding for themselves. I picked up all sorts of information along the way,” he explains.

  I hold up the book, thumbing the well-worn corner of the cover where the purple is peeling away to expose the dull wood beneath. “So, you made this?”

  “That’s right.” Corinth nods, self-satisfied. “Twelve of the best techniques that I was able to locate and five different meditation practices to help center the mind for the work.”

  “If you made it, why does it look like it has been kept in a trunk for a few centuries?” The book whines as I flip it to open to the middle, a few specks of dust falling from the very graphic, stenciled woman sitting in a lotus position across the two pages. The dust flutters toward the floor but vanishes before dirtying the laid stone. Running my hand over the paper, I feel nothing there, but shaking the book makes more dust fall from the illustration.

  “Well, because a compendium of incredibly powerful and ancient techniques should look old, don’t you think?” I roll my eyes at his reply and make the book vanish into my vault. “Halford gave me the same look when I gave it to him, but it seems to have turned out all right.”

  I can’t argue with that. Body tempering is the process that a magician undergoes when reaching the third rank, when they rebuild themselves with both purpose and their futures in mind. It is the step that magicians take to fuse their bodies with the shards of their souls they have called from the divine realm and trapped in the material inside their soul cages. The ways to go about rebuilding oneself are as infinite and unique as magicians themselves, but that doesn’t mean there are no wrong ways to go about it, and there are most certainly right ways to do it.

  The last time I saw Halford, the man was seven and a half feet tall and built like someone chiseled him from marble. He had been punted into the sky by an ungodly powerful monster and came back a few minutes later, hardly any worse for it. He had always been incredibly strong, but reaching the third rank had allowed him to pick up a second attribute specialization in speed, something I didn’t even know was possible for magicians. If he attained all of those things by using one or more of the techniques in Corinth’s book, then I would be a fool if I didn’t study it closely.

  For the last few months, since I first began to tinker with how my own body works, looking forward to my ascension to the third rank has been on my mind. As Corinth told me before, purifying affixes so that a magician can infuse their remade forms with them in order to make the concepts inherent to them was half of the purpose of reaching the third. How will that work with my Emperor’s Prerogative ability? The body that a magician crafts for themselves when reaching the third rank is meant to be permanent, a final form in a way. Should I just make a body with the fire affix like Corinth and allow my other affixes to always be secondary? I don’t know, but maybe reading the book will give me some answers.

  “Thank you for this,” I say. “It is almost like you believe I will actually reach the third rank.”

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  “You said you would,” he replies, shrugging his one good shoulder. “All you have to do is go through a few more life-threatening battles. No big deal.”

  “No big deal,” I agree. Before an awkward silence can grow, I cut it off. “Do you want to see what I have been working on?”

  “I would love to.”

  My laboratory is exactly as I left it a few days before. My soot-smeared undershirt still lies thrown over the lush chair sitting before my enchanting table, though, now it is more like a soot-stained shirt, one that smells of toil and sweat. The etching wand that I have been working on lies in the center of the table, completely dismantled with wire sticking every which way in the middle of being etched itself. More than a dozen open books litter the floor, and the bookshelves that line one wall are filled with as many foul-smelling acids, industrial solvents, and old food bowls as they are books.

  Corinth snickers as he follows me inside. “Ah, now this is proper chaos. You must have been working hard.”

  I pause a few steps into the room, the sheer disorder hitting me as I look around. How had I not smelled the rotting food lingering in the bowls before? Well, I know how. Dovik’s workplace always stinks so bad with acidic smells that it is hard to smell anything in the entire apartment. I wonder briefly if I can make an array that would trap the stenches inside his workspace. I really haven’t devoted my time to creating any enchantment arrays yet; it might be a good first foray into the subject.

  “Right. If everything isn’t a mess, how can anything get done?” Trying to look casual, I tap the old bowls and make them vanish into my vault. “You should show me your workspace sometime,” I say before pausing. “Actually, you have never shown me where you live, have you?”

  “It is a lot like this,” he says, ignoring my question. “Except, instead of instruments, chemicals, and mediums, a spellcrafter’s laboratory is full of paper. Paper everywhere: on the walls, the floors, and in my case, the ceiling.

  “They have these things called books,” I inform him, heading to the crate in the corner of the room and struggling to lift free the obsidianate helmet that I had commissioned a few weeks ago. A grunt escapes me as I throw it to him. Corinth catches it with one hand, not even having the good grace to pretend it is heavy to him.

  “They don’t make books large enough for my diagrams,” he says, turning the helmet around and squinting at it. “Obsidianate?”

  “I was looking for a sturdy material,” I say, shuffling and organizing the loose papers on the table. Who put them like this? It doesn’t make any sense. “Weight wasn’t a constraint, but cost was. For a moment, I almost ordered a suit of armor made from pure iron, but obsidianate is actually stronger.”

  “There are many things stronger,” Corinth says, setting the helmet down on the table despite how the wood complains. He picks up a paper and starts scanning it. “Bluesteel and Maidentin come to mind.”

  “Right. Let me just sell a few castles to afford them.” Looking down at the wand, something that I missed originally jumps out, and I start sketching an improvement to the rune I was working on. I must have really been tired if I drew a skalda rune with only three lines when there should be five.

  “Well, you have to take the castles first,” Corinth says, still looking at the paper in his hand. “Many of the beast continents were once inhabited, and you can find all sorts of goodies on them when you go looking. Actually, since you are going to Tabriss anyway, doing some ruin diving there might be fun.”

  “Just go digging around in Hell, huh?”

  “That is what the Vivantee do,” he says. “I managed to tentatively get you a position with one of their young groups that will be heading down there when you are ready to make the expedition. It could be fun.”

  I stop, turning to him. “Did you have fun when you were in Hell?”

  He shrugs again. “It isn’t all bad. Nowhere is all bad. Well, except for home when mom was mad.” He gets the reaction he is looking for, and when I am done giggling to myself, he waves the paper. “This is your course load? You are taking more than double a standard curriculum."

  “They recommended remedial classes to me,” I say. “Also, I don’t sleep much, so doing the work isn’t a problem.” A few minutes pass with me sketching the rune in my notebook before I realize that he hasn’t said anything else. I look up, finding him looking back at me with a serious expression on his face.

  “How is the school?” he asks. “I had some difficulties when first attending.”

  He doesn’t need to explain. Dovik and I have been facing what might loosely be called difficulties. “I am getting through it,” I tell him. “That is all I can do, really.”

  “And you aren’t sleeping?”

  “I don’t need to. I am a Recovery Specialist, remember? I can go a month without sleep if I need to.”

  “It is still important to rest your mind.” He stops, his eyes scanning the space in front of his hand absently. “Have you…have you been using the throne’s power?”

  The question makes me pause and set down the pencil in my hand. “Why?”

  Corinth sighs and pushes the hair out of his face. “I can see your soul, Charlene. The damage has gotten worse. Using the throne’s power actively might cause more damage and accelerate the rate at which the connection shears apart. I gave you nearly a decade before, but since I last saw you, it looks like more than a year of that time has slipped away. I still believe that it can be fixed, but soul strain can very easily become soul damage, and there are very few ways to fix that.”

  “I know.” I find my hand touching the scar on my stomach and flinch, pulling it away. “No, I haven’t been using it.”

  “Good.” He nods. “Good.”

  It wasn’t entirely the truth. I had used the massive boost to power that the Throne of War grants me a single time when first escaping the Shadow Hydra and then again when I needed to protect Jasper. Just using it a handful of times had strained it so much that I lost more than a year of the time that I had. That is worrying, but not too big a deal. I am going to attain the spear in the next year and a half. I have to if I want to participate in the trial. I have to if I want to find those monsters again, and that is something I need.

  “Have you noticed anything being off?” he asks. “Soul strain can have other side effects. Sudden emotional changes, fainting, and even hallucinations on occasion.”

  My hand pauses as I reach to pick up the pencil once again. “No,” I answer, putting the lead back to the paper. “I am fine.”

  My brother stands above me for a long time, not saying a word, and just looking down at me. “You know, Charlene, practiced magicians can see souls all the time. You get good at reading them, at seeing emotions flicker across and even discerning lies.”

  “Dovik mentioned something like that,” I tell him, continuing to sketch.

  Corinth stands next to me for a long time, waiting for an admittance that won’t come. He blows out a breath when he turns to leave. “I’m going to make something to eat,” he says, the tension entirely gone from his voice. “Want anything?”

  “Something warm,” I say, not looking up. “Tea or coffee is fine.”

  “Right.”

  He leaves me alone as I continue to sketch on the page, or rather, I would be alone, if it weren’t for the scorched hand sitting on the table next to me.

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