Hadeon didn't notice the impact.
His skin was blistering from the pressure of being rewritten, bit by bit, syllable by syllable. Every ounce of greed, every hungry calculation, every time he had said "just a little more," the shard swallowed it all.
The ward lights shattered one by one. The room no longer responded to him. The ether lattice bent away from his signature like iron from rust. The console flickered in response, then hissed out of existence.
And then it began to speak.
Not aloud, but through the marrow of his bones and the blood running backwards in his veins. The voice of the shard, of the soul fragment within it, was velvet and rot, the voice of something that had waited far too long to be invited back in.
"You wanted power," it whispered, coiling around what was left of him. "So now, we share."
