Chapter 46: Domain Expansion
Then the air changed.
The temperature dropped and rose in the same second, a simultaneous shift with no physical explanation, and the mana field moved. Inward. Starting from the air and the ground and the forest itself at once.
The warmth hit him a half-second before the voice did.
The warmth. Specifically. The same warmth that had been meeting him at the cave entrance every morning for three months.
"Domain Expansion."
"Scarlet Abyss."
The forest was gone.
The clearing was gone.
The sounds cut off.
The ground was the color of dried blood. The air tasted like iron. The sky above was dark in a way that had nothing to do with clouds. The Daemon Caller dissolved in the daemon’s grip. No more trees, no more forest. Only the domain.
He lowered his hand.
Twenty-one days, he thought.
So that is what you were doing with it.
There was still a daemon in front of him.
She had been tracking his mana through the seal since he left the cave.
Not clearly, the seal was not built for it, but she could feel the shape of his presence in the forest the way she had learned to feel his footsteps on the path. And she felt when the shape changed. When it became smaller, more compressed, the specific quality of something running out.
Two hundred years and two months.
For two hundred years the terms of her refusal had been clear. The transfer was offered. She declined. The Keeper came with patience and journals and the careful language of people who believed that repetition would eventually produce the result they wanted. She outlasted all of them.
For two months she had been listening to his voice in the dark. Training sessions and weather and the things in the Keeper’s volumes and what he was planning for the academy and the fact that
Tessira had called him Mister in front of the Marquess of Valdren. Every morning the same path, the same floor, the same voice talking to a cave that gave him nothing back except warmth.
She had been doing something with what he left on the floor. Working through the sealed space between what she had and what the ritual required. She had not made a decision about any of it.
The seal broke from the inside out.
The way ice broke when the temperature had been wrong long enough. The structure releasing, everything held going the direction it had been pressed against.
She felt the domain expand through stone and soil and forest floor and she let it go, all of it, everything she had been holding. The Scarlet Abyss went out in every direction at once and the forest became something else and she stood in the space where the cave had been and looked at her own hands in the red light of what she had made.
She had not stood in two hundred years.
Her hands looked the way she remembered them. Which was strange, because she had not been sure they would.
She looked at the domain around her.
The Scarlet Abyss had been theoretical for a very long time. She had built it in her mind during the first century, working through the construction. She had refined it during the second century when the daemon incursions started coming close enough to the cave entrance.
She had never cast it.
It was larger than she had expected. Or the same size she had designed it and larger than she remembered designing. One of the two.
In the clearing ahead, through the red air of the domain, the boy she had been listening to for three months was standing with his hand still raised for Hell’s Fire, looking at the daemon in front of him.
She could see that he had registered what had happened and filed it under deal with later.
She had watched him do that. File things under deal with later. He did it the way he did most things.
Without announcing it, without making it dramatic, the decision already complete by the time anyone else registered he had made one.
She had found that quality remarkable from about the fourth morning onward, and irritating from the sixth, and then somewhere around the tenth it had stopped being either and simply become something she knew about him.
In the domain, the daemon was still alive.
She looked at it.
The daemon looked back. The low sound in its chest changed register.
She raised one hand.
The domain responded.
She watched it resolve and stood in the red air after, in a domain that had done what it was built to do, and thought about the fact that the boy was going to turn around shortly and she was going to have to be something other than warmth and a voice in the dark.
She had been a sealed entity for two hundred years.
She had been a vampire for considerably longer than that.
She was going to have to remember how to be a person.
She looked at her hands again in the red light of the Scarlet Abyss, then up at the darkened sky.
"...Hello"
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