Chapter 767: Bloor Rose

Thepes drove his foot through the frozen stone instead.

Blood rose around him in a ring of spikes. He forced them toward both successors and the runes behind them, spending what he had gathered in one attempt to open a path.

Mingyue raised both swords.

Ice formed across the spikes reaching her. Alex’s hammer broke the ones in front of him, but another passed around its head and pierced his right side.

Alex staggered, and Thepes moved for the gap beside him.

Mingyue’s blade caught the back of his arm before he reached it.

Thepes turned on her with his fangs bared. His left hand closed toward her throat.

She ducked beneath his reaching hand and drove her shoulder against his chest, keeping her upper sword outside his left arm. Her other blade swept low through the blood supporting his damaged knee.

His weight shifted onto the leg that could no longer hold it.

Alex struck him across the back of the left knee.

Thepes fell. He drove his left hand into the floor to rise, but the blood spikes were still scattered across the room. When he called them back, Alex’s runes caught them against the walls. His own pull dragged his arm sideways long enough for the ice to close.

Mingyue drove one sword into the floor beside his shoulder.

Purple frost spread beneath his torso and across his hips. Alex’s runes closed over the gaps where his blood had been moving toward the door and broken ceiling.

Thepes forced his left hand outward until his fingers met the frozen boundary and stopped.

He cut through his own left wrist with a thin blade of blood, leaving the trapped hand behind. New blood rose from the severed arm, trying to form another hand beyond the ice.

The blood struck the rune barrier and gathered against its inner surface. He could move the drops along it, but he could not draw them through to the other side.

Mingyue froze the spreading blood before it reached an opening.

Thepes pulled what remained back toward his arm. His wrist began to close, slowly and painfully, inside the same confined space.

Alex knelt at the other side of the barrier.

Blood ran down the man’s ribs where the spike had pierced him. He kept one hand over the wound while using the other to adjust the marks around Thepes’s shoulders.

The pressure changed.

Thepes could still feel his heart beating. Blood still moved inside his chest, but each attempt to send it outward met a closed edge.

He pushed harder until the rune above his right shoulder flickered.

Mingyue placed her second sword beside it, feeding frost into the gap before it could open.

"Enough," she said.

Thepes stared at her.

He could see blood drying at the corner of her mouth. Her wounded forearm shook as she held the blade in place.

She was tired. He knew she was tired.

He forced blood toward the join he had opened before. Alex moved it again, and Mingyue froze the narrow path beneath his hand. She was watching his fingers now.

He called his followers again. At the same moment, his right shoulder pulled against the ice. He had to turn his attention back to the blood gathering there.

Outside, several red-eyed bodies hesitated. They had been turning toward the building together. Now one struck at the nearest living soldier while another kept climbing the ruined wall.

The formation he had been pulling toward himself broke apart.

He tried to hold the order while shaping another rune. The old pattern came apart when Alex shifted the boundary beside his wrist.

The bodies outside continued fighting, but they no longer moved together in the way he wanted.

Alex looked toward the broken window. Beyond it, the opposing army began pushing the scattered attackers away from the road.

"Dorian has room to move," he said.

Thepes pulled against the ice until the wound at his wrist opened again.

No fresh blood rose from below. No stream reached him from the bodies outside. The power in the web remained beyond his reach, and the thought of taking hold of it again made him remember his arm thinning inside Lolth’s hand.

He had watched Soren become an empty body when the blood left him.

For a few moments above the service yard, he had felt his own body going the same way.

Thepes stopped pulling long enough to look at the torn skin over his shoulder.

He had nearly fed himself to the creature he wanted to consume.

"You don’t own me," he said.

Alex looked back at him.

"I’m keeping you from killing anyone else."

Mingyue drew one sword out of the floor after the ice around it had thickened. Her other blade stayed set in the ice beside his shoulder while Alex finished the outer line.

Thepes watched their hands.

They had not broken the core inside him. He could still feel its power, and his shoulder was slowly closing. He watched the changing joins and held the incomplete rune pattern in his mind.

They would have to keep watching him too.

A shadow moved across the broken window.

Pale threads descended past the building. Farther away, a light woman stood above the service yard, and the red glow beneath her spread through the green smoke again.

Alex turned toward it.

Mingyue stayed beside Thepes’s restraint.

Thepes looked from the strand outside to the runes holding his blood in place.

He kept his hand inside the boundary.

Alex checked the rune above Thepes’s shoulder before leaving the broken room.

The mark held when the restrained Progenitor pushed against it. His fingers traced the beginning of the rune he had tried earlier. Alex shifted the join away from that hand before leaving.

"If he starts shaping a mark again, call me immediately," Alex said. "Don’t wait for the boundary to break."

Vesa hovered near the doorway, her four wings beating clear of the broken frame. "I will, King."

Two of Dorian’s soldiers waited outside. Alex pointed them toward the streets on either side of the building. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

"Keep other bodies away from this room. If the web reaches the wall, call us. Don’t try to hold it yourselves."

They moved into position.