"You shouldn't have that kind of power yet," Damon said quietly, staring at me with something between awe and dread. "Not without years of training, not without the ritual fully completing first."
"Maybe your ritual was never the way to wake it," I said, my voice hoarse but steady, the vision still burning behind my eyes. "Maybe it only woke because I refused you, not because you tried to force it."
Wren's translucent form solidified slightly, more visible now than she had been before, drawing strength somehow from whatever had just happened. "She's right," Wren said. "I split my own power in two centuries ago because I saw exactly what forcing it back together would cost. Every ambitious man who has tried since then has only ever triggered small fractures, small warnings. This is the fi
