The first sign was pain.
Not the clean kind—not the sharp, honest agony of a spell backfiring or a ward collapsing—but a crawling, intimate discomfort that crept beneath the skin and settled into the marrow.
Maelis dropped to one knee.
Her breath left her in a sharp gasp as the world tilted, torchlight in the stone chamber smearing into streaks of gold and shadow. The sigil etched into the floor beneath her boots pulsed once—faint, irregular—before dimming again.
Too weak.
Too unstable.
Her fingers dug into the cold stone as she steadied herself, heart pounding not with fear, but with calculation.
That shouldn’t have happened.
Across the chamber, the other witches felt it too. Not all of them—only those bound closely enough to the working. A murmur rippled through the circle. Someo
