Night settled fully over the formation, and Sagiri changed the shape of his resistance rather than the fact of it.
He let the outer relic bond slide toward the channel Sir Black had already prepared, choosing which piece of himself the structure was allowed to take.
'Protect the Archive first,' he thought, pain climbing his forearm in a slow tide, 'the rest is only weight.'
The bond weakened, and something in him went with it, a scrap of memory too small to name before it crossed into the dark beyond the ring.
He closed his hand around Nokai and held the one thing the formation could not be permitted to own.
"You are spending yourself to protect a memory," Sir Black said, watching the line move, "when the body carrying it will fail regardless."
Sagiri answered without looking at him, "You keep calling people vessels because it makes the math simpler."
