Dorian’s arm hadn’t healed by the time Elias found him three days later in the Errata’s sparring hall, alone, running drills one-handed with a grim, joyless focus that had nothing to do with training.
“They said it’d come back,” Elias said, from the doorway.
“They said a lot of things.” Dorian didn’t turn around.
The grey along his forearm hadn’t spread, but it hadn’t faded either — a permanent, pale scar of unprinted paper where skin should be, faintly visible under his sleeve.
“Turns out ‘partially erased’ isn’t really a condition anyone here has a fix for. Just a management plan. Isn’t that nice.”
“Dorian—”
“I was Tier One in two weeks.” Dorian rounded on him, and for the first time since they’d met, there was nothing performative in his anger — it had gone somewhere colder and more honest. Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
“Two weeks, Elias. I trained for it. I earned every scrap of Ink I had, the hard way, exactly like the rulebook says you’re supposed to. And you walk into your first deployment and pull something out of thin air that four-hundred-year-old Redactors have never even heard of, and it costs you a headache and a nap, and it costs me an arm that doesn’t work right anymore.” He laughed, short and humorless.
“Tell me that’s fair. Go on. I’ll wait.”
“It’s not fair,” Elias said, because it wasn’t, and lying about it felt like the fastest way to lose whatever thin trust existed between them.
“I don’t know why it worked for me and not you. I don’t think I did anything special. I think I just happened to be the right kind of broken for that particular story.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not supposed to be. It’s just true.” Elias stepped further into the hall.
“For what it’s worth — I’d take the arm back if I could. Trade it for something. I don’t know what. I just know I don’t feel good about being the reason it happened.”
“You know what the worst part is? I don’t even hate you for it. I want to. It’d be easier.” He looked down at his own scarred forearm.
“I just keep thinking — if a Tier Zero with no training can accidentally do this just by meaning something hard enough, what happens when someone meaner than you figures out how to weaponize it on purpose?”
The question landed in the room and sat there, ugly and unanswerable, and Elias realized with a slow, sinking feeling that he hadn’t once considered that angle — that the thing he’d done out of instinct in a wheat field might, in someone else’s hands, be a knife rather than a mercy.
Before he could answer, the hall’s far door slammed open, and Toby stood in it, breathing hard, none of his usual grin anywhere on his face.
“Priya needs everyone,” he said.
“Right now. Something’s wrong with the Ember Sovereign Canon. Something bigger. The current farmboy’s Ink signature just spiked off the charts — and it’s spiking the exact same way yours did.”