The sensation defies description.

  Flesh closes around flesh. Mouths that were eating air find something substantive at last. But they do not consume. They reconnect. Tissue weaves into tissue with wet efficiency that suggests practice, suggests precedent, suggests this is not the first time.

  I feel my spine begin to rebuild.

  Vertebrae clicking into alignment. Spinal cord threading through channels that widen to accommodate its passage. The process is slower than it should be. Incomplete. My body remembers the shape it wants to become but cannot quite achieve it.

  Not yet.

  I exist between states.

  The Writhing Mass has not finished its work. Mouths still work along surfaces that should be smooth. Tendrils retract in stuttering motions, pulling inward but failing to disappear entirely. My chest remains open, ribs spread like fingers around a cavity that pulses with organs still finding their proper arrangement.

  I am reforming.

  I am vulnerable.

  Something moves at the edge of my awareness.

  The motion registers before the identity. A shape descending through the ruined junction, picking its way across debris with purpose that cuts through the settling chaos. Light gathers in its hands. Condensing. Solidifying.

  Talon.

  The golden twin stands twenty feet away, his blade of compressed light already formed. The weapon hums with energy that makes the air vibrate, silver radiance coating its edge in patterns I recognize. Skathrith power.

  His eyes hold nothing I can read. The emptiness is worse than any emotion would be. It speaks of something burned away entirely, leaving only function where feeling once lived.

  He sees the Writhing Mass.

  He sees the mouths still working across my partially formed torso. The tendrils that have not fully retracted. The ribs spread open around organs that pulse in rhythms no human body should contain.

  He sees the thing that ate his sister.

  Rage blooms in his eyes.

  The blade rises.

  I try to move. Try to force my incomplete body into motion. My legs do not respond correctly. Muscles that have not finished reconnecting fire in sequences that produce nothing but twitching. I am meat attempting to become person, and the timing is catastrophically wrong.

  Talon crosses the distance between us in an instant.

  I feel the blade's heat against my malformed skin. Fresh pain hisses into being.

  Then strings erupt from nothing.

  Invisible threads wrap Talon mid-stride, seizing his arms and legs and throat. They yank him sideways with force that should shatter bone, his body ragdolling through the air before the momentum arrests. He hangs suspended, blade still humming in a hand he can no longer move.

  Binah.

  I feel her behind me. The strain of the intervention pulses through our connection, through whatever bond links us across the space between my awareness and her vast, patient presence. She has committed strings to save me. Strings she could not spare. Strings that were holding something else together.

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  The gestalt destabilizes.

  I feel it happen before I understand it. Pressure builds in spaces I cannot locate, in the architecture Binah keeps hidden. Things unseen begin to vibrate. To resonate. To transmit.

  Something breaks through, not quite memory nor image. This has no narrative I can follow, no context I can grasp.

  Emotion.

  Pure and undifferentiated. A wave of affect that crashes through my incomplete form with the force of a physical blow. I do not know what I am feeling. Cannot name it. Cannot trace it to any source or cause or triggering event.

  There is only the feeling itself.

  Rage, like a burning furnace.

  It fills me like water fills a drowning man's lungs. Every partially formed muscle clenches. Every half-connected nerve fires. The rage has no target, no direction, no object it can attach itself to. It simply exists. Absolute. Consuming. The only truth remaining in a mind that has lost access to everything else.

  I do not know why I am angry.

  I only know that I am.

  The rage builds. Compounds. Feeds on itself in cycles that accelerate beyond my ability to track. I want to destroy something. Everything. The walls that still stand and the bodies that still breathe and the golden shape suspended in invisible strings before me.

  My body responds.

  The Writhing Mass has its own imperatives, its own solutions to problems the conscious mind cannot solve. Flesh hardens where it was soft. Bone solidifies where it was cartilage. The open cavity of my chest begins to close, ribs drawing together around organs that finally remember their proper positions.

  But the closing is wrong.

  My right arm does not reform as an arm.

  I watch it happen without understanding. The flesh extends. Lengthens. Reshapes itself into something that was never part of human anatomy. Bone and tissue and muscle weave together in configurations that serve a different purpose, that answer a different need.

  A scythe.

  My arm has become a scythe.

  The blade curves outward from where my elbow should be, four feet of organic edge that gleams with wetness in the junction's dim light. Silver radiance sheathes it before I consciously summon the Skathrith's power. The coating arrives instinctively, unbidden, the weapon's hunger finally aligned with flesh that can satisfy it.

  Eater and Skathrith.

  United.

  No separation anymore.

  The wave of emotion retreats, flowing back to wherever it came from, and I can almost breathe.

  Talon thrashes from his suspended position. His expression shifts for the first time, mouth pulling tight, eyes fixing on the blade that was my arm. The strings creak. He strains against them with force that should break bone.

  He recognizes something.

  I do not know what.

  Binah's strings strain around him. I feel her effort through our connection, the mounting cost of holding him immobile while the memory-isolation system fractures and bleeds. She cannot maintain both. The physical intervention and the psychological containment demand resources that do not exist simultaneously.

  She is choosing me over the system she built.

  The system fails further.

  Another wave crashes through me. Stronger than the first. Emotion without anchor, affect without narrative, feeling without fact. I am being torn apart from the inside by experiences I cannot remember, by truths I cannot access, by a past that refuses to stay buried even though I cannot perceive it directly.

  The rage returns.

  This time it finds a target.

  Talon.

  He tried to kill me. Descended through the junction with light in his hands and murder in his empty eyes. Came to finish what his blade started, to end the abomination, to avenge something I cannot remember taking from him.

  He would have succeeded.

  If Binah had not intervened. If the strings had not caught him. If I had remained vulnerable for three more seconds, his blade would have found my reforming spine and severed it before the vertebrae finished clicking into place.

  He would have killed me.

  While I was becoming.

  While I was helpless.

  The understanding transforms the rage into something colder. More focused. The shapeless fury acquires edges, becomes a thing with direction and purpose and specific intent. I do not know why I feel what I feel. Do not know what memories fuel this furnace.

  I know only that Talon must die.

  The thought arrives without moral weight. Without consideration of consequence. It is simple fact, mathematical certainty, the only possible outcome of the equation my fractured mind can still compute.

  He came to kill me while I was helpless.

  Now I am not helpless.

  My scythe-arm moves before I command it. The blade cuts air with a sound like tearing silk, silver light trailing in its wake. The weight is wrong. The balance is wrong. Everything about this limb contradicts the body I remember possessing.

  It feels perfect.

  Binah's strings snap.

  The sound cracks through the junction like breaking ice. Talon drops from suspension, lands in a crouch with blade already rising to guard. His eyes meet mine across twenty feet of rubble and corpses.

  For one breath, we are frozen.

  Twin mirrors reflecting twin furnaces. I see myself in his emptiness. He sees himself in my rage. The recognition passes between us without words, without gesture, without anything but the simple fact of mutual understanding.

  We are going to kill each other.

  Or die trying.

  The distance between us collapses.

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