For a moment the bastille was nothing but the sound of men sucking in air — the sharp intake of the living refusing to be swallowed by the dark. Razille's hand had closed on the world and something in the corridor had shifted; prisoners ran like animals tasting grass after winter, and the chaos was a living thing that fed on speed.
Then the spell tightened.
Razille did not shout commands. She did not need to. The dark that wrapped her was a language itself; it hummed through bone and tendon, through the thin wires of fear and hope that tied men to action. Where she placed a finger, a thought bent. The freed prisoners who had started toward exits skidded mid-stride as if a cold wind had caught their legs. Those closest to Razille found their anger cooling into a rigid, obedient focus. She did not so much order them as re-tune them; a subtle, almost ceremonial restraint fell across their movements.
"No one should come between me and him. Ensure that." Razille whispered, and the phrase reddened into the bones of the men like a pressed coin. A gaoler who had been racing for an iron gate froze, then walked not toward the exit but toward Razille, eyes soft and distant. He took a position guarding a corridor as if it were a privilege.
Solis saw the change in the smallest conveniences: a man of six-foot with a crowbar now standing at a window like a sentry; a gangly thief becoming the natural center of a human chain. Razille rearranged them with the grace of someone setting pieces on a chess board. This was not random mayhem. This was a sculptor's work, and Razille's sculpture had a single hollow at its heart — Solis himself.
He pushed forward, heat in his chest like a forge stoked too fast. The red sword thudded against his palm as if it had its own answer to the world. He felt the aura like a drum under skin: thirty percent, forty, then sixty — and when he pushed past that number the sensation was no longer a ribbon of warmth but a living burn. The world tightened to the edge of a coin.
"Damn it." he muttered, each syllable a strike. He drew with both hands, habit and instinct pulled by the sword's hum. The blade came free like a memory, and for one bright second the world sharpened to a knife-edge of motion. He moved like a man in a tunnel: there, a hand to free a throat; here, a blade to bar a swinging crowbar; there, an elbow to an attacker's ribs.
Razille watched him, expression unreadable. The dark around her thinned and braided into fingers that reached for the men surrounding her. Those fingers touched muscle, memory, the faintest of loyalties, and pulled. Men who might have defended a thousand causes now bent like reeds. A gaoler tried to break the chain; his shoulders hit the invisible line and he folded into an obedience that tasted like sleep. Razille's voice was small, precise. "Keep them away."
Solis went for her the way a storm goes for a cliff: blunt, inevitable, burning. His aura rose and spread through him — sharp as iron, hot as a kiln. He had never pushed this far. The technique Devon taught — align the breath, the spine, the intent — felt like a map he'd only partially traced. He operated on instinct now, muscles remembering the drills, the discipline. He struck with exquisite, terrible economy. His sword cut a path not to end life but to redirect it: the edge grazed, clipped, clattered; he struck bone and leather; he redirected weight.
Razille met him without fear. She did not parry with steel; she answered with a storm of shadow. The black hew around her moved like a swarm — fingers of smoke that twisted the world where they touched. They curled at the ankles of Solis's nearest allies, wrapped around wrists, pushed breath from lungs in a cold pressure that made even the hardiest man feel like a child in the dark.
Each time Solis forced a gap, Razille folded it up again. Her magic was not brute force so much as clever subtraction: steal their breath, snuff the feet; take their heat and slow them. The dark touched Solis like an amputation of will — sudden, intimate. He felt the aura leach away in pulses: a sting, then a hollowness. He tried to keep the burn steady but the leaks multiplied, running along nerves, down to joints.
"Hold on!" Ada's voice snapped in his ear. She moved like a defender who had read his ledger of wounds. Her blade kept a circle carved in the riot, and where her steel sang there was small safety. She saw the way Razille manipulated bodies and teeth; she saw Solis' breaths grow jagged and his hands tremble on the hilt.
Solis tasted copper and the memory of Tedric's last lesson — one breath, one intent, do not become the weapon. He tried to draw his mind back to that anchor, but Razille's darkness ricocheted through his nerves and for every moment he held the light, two slipped away. It was like gripping smoke; the harder he held, the more it seemed to leak.
"Son of a—" Devon hit a man who had been about to plunge a bar into an ally. The man folded; Devon kicked him into a heap and barked orders. Bronn and Almond worked with nets, with rope, with small mechanized devices Octaknights had devised for catching horses; they bought seconds. Seconds felt like coins, and Solis had to spend them quickly.
He pushed his aura; seventy percent output; screamed behind his ribs and the world bloomed into a cold clarity. For a breath — one bright, terrible breath — he had the edge. His footwork was a storm, his hands sawed through the smoke; a man lunged with a broken bottle and Solis slashed the arm and then, with the pommel of the axe, sent the attacker tumbling. He reached in close proximity to Razille — close enough to see the black storm coiling in her pupils—and he struck.
The sword sang. The blade kissed her cloak and sliced a line of crimson along the fabric. The dark around her surged like a wounded animal. For a heart-clip of time, he thought he saw recognition scroll across her face — shock, maybe pity. Her lips moved, a single sound that could have been an apology or a prayer. He was closer now. He would take her cuff, he would end this with the law's hand.
But the cost had been paid. The strain of using higher outputs of Aura Release Technique had a ledger and Solis had borrowed against his body past what was wise. The muscles in his legs trembled like ropes left too long in storm. His vision blurred at the edges. A cold weight sank into his bones. The glow of his aura fluttered and then, traitorously, stuttered.
Razille smiled then — not a smile of joy but a practiced, small curve — and the dark lunged through the falter. It met him where the aura thinned and it took.