"What the hell." Dexmon gritted the words through his teeth. His free hand yanked his sleeve up to the elbow.
Next to him, Gavriel was doing the same thing. Identical motion. Identical urgency. Two men pulling back fabric at the same time to look at the same problem on different arms.
Their marks were glowing gold. Both of them. The Hidden Flame marks that connected them to Serena were lit from within, pulsing at a rhythm that matched each other's perfectly, synchronized across twenty feet of training field like two instruments playing the same note.
Then the marks changed.
An outer ring was carving itself into the skin around each mark in real time. The line burned its way through flesh the way a brand burns through leather, slow, deliberate, precise. The ring formed millimeter by millimeter, the gold searing a new border around the existing mark, expanding it, adding to it, the mark rewriting its own architecture while both men watched it happen on their own bodies.
