“But that’s clearly not how it works,” Zorian protested. “Zach and I have the same damn marker! The tracking spell wouldn’t have worked otherwise!”
“It’s broken,” Kael said calmly. “Your marker, that is. There are parts of it that are totally inert, either because they do not acknowledge you as its rightful host or because they are missing some critical piece that got lost in the transfer. I’m guessing that at least one of those is supposed to send a signal to the looping mechanism when you die, terminating the loop prematurely—that would neatly explain why you get sent back when Zach dies but he doesn’t experience the same when you end up dead. He has the intact version of the marker, whereas you don’t.”
“But the main part of the thing works?”
“In a sense. It does everything it is s
