[Emma's POV]
Agony was a language, and the talisman was a cruel poet. Emma lay splayed on the cold, unforgiving expanse of the upstairs hallway floor, each gasp a ragged punctuation in the verse of her torment. This was not the clean, sharp pain of a wound. This was an unraveling.
The Advisor’s artifact—a loathsome, pulsing green thing—didn't just suppress the wellspring of magic within her; it hooked into the tributaries of her power with barbed, metaphysical claws and pulled. Every thrum of its light was a seismic tremor along her spiritual fault lines, a scraping out of her essence that left her veins feeling like hollow, scorched conduits. She could almost hear it, a sickening, high-pitched whine as the delicate, inherited magic from her mother frayed and snapped under the strain.
