Henrik was talking about his wife's cooking when his left eye burst.
The pupil swallowed the iris inward in one wet contraction, and the socket filled with something that glowed the color of a furnace through a crack. Henrik's mouth was still moving. He was still saying something about the salted pork being too dry this time of year, how his wife always over-cured the winter batch, and his voice was still his voice for another two seconds before it changed.
Dorian stepped back. His hand found his sword grip before his brain caught up.
Henrik's Ichor circuits lit up under the skin of his neck and jaw like veins of hot metal pushed to the surface. The glow spread downward, into his chest, along his arms. His fingers started to lengthen. Not quickly — slowly enough that you could watch the knuckles stretch, the skin thin, and the bones rearrange themselves into something that didn't belong on a human hand. He was Hardened-rank, same as Dorian's father. He'd held this wall for nine years. He had a wife, and a lamp was still burning in a window three streets below because nobody had told her yet.
He tried to speak again. What came out sounded like a dog learning to use a throat it had stolen.
"Off the wall," someone said. Dorian didn't know who. "Get OFF the wall, get back—"
Nobody moved. Twelve militia on the eastern section, and all twelve stood and watched Henrik come apart because it happened slowly enough that every second felt like it might be the last, like maybe it would stop, like maybe he'd come back. People always watched. Dorian had seen this twice before — once when he was fourteen, once five months ago — and both times the people nearby had done exactly this. They stood there. They watched. They hoped. Because the alternative was admitting that the man in front of you was already gone and the thing wearing his shape was just using the last of him as fuel.
Henrik's spine bent at an angle spines weren't designed to reach. The sound it made was wet and structural, like a house settling in the wrong direction. His militia coat split down the back. The skin underneath moved and reshaped, his Ember affinity expressing itself without any of the control that nine years of discipline had built. Raw Ichor burned through a body that had stopped being able to contain it.
That was what Slag looked like. The Church called it moral failure — a cultivator whose faith and discipline weren't strong enough to contain the divine gift. The frontier called it what it was. Bad luck. Bad Ichor. A bad night when the Tempering you'd lived with for years decided to finish what it started.
Corwin Vane arrived on the eastern wall at a run, Severin a step behind him. Dorian's father took one look at Henrik and drew his sword. He didn't hesitate and he didn't speak to the thing that used to be a man he'd served beside for nine years. Corwin assessed, decided, and moved in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"Hold him," Corwin said. His voice was flat and steady and certain, the same one he used to call dinner. "Severin, left side. You, right. Pin the arms."
Severin moved without a word. Dorian watched his older brother grab what had been Henrik's left arm — thicker now, the fingers fused into something that looked like a mace made of bone — and hold it against the parapet with both hands and his full body weight. Another militia member took the right. Henrik thrashed. The sound he was making had stopped being a voice and become a frequency, a vibration that Dorian felt at the base of his skull.
Corwin stepped in. One cut. Clean and precise, placed where the neck met the shoulder, angled through the gap between the cervical plates that Henrik's transformation hadn't finished closing. Nine years of wall patrols had taught Corwin where a Slag's armor hadn't set yet. The blade went in. Henrik dropped.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then the surge came.
Henrik's remaining Ichor detonated outward in a single uncontrolled pulse — everything his body had been holding, released at once. The blast wasn't visible. It was thermal and resonant, a wave of heat and frequency that hit the wall's ward array like a fist hitting glass. The ward-light along the eastern section died. All of it. Every inscribed panel, every carved line, every humming barrier between Thornwall and the Spoil went dark at the same instant.
The blackout lasted three seconds.
For three seconds, Dorian stood on an unprotected wall and looked at the Spoil without the ward-shimmer between him and it. The treeline was closer than he thought. The darkness between the trunks was deeper than it had any right to be. Something in that darkness was looking back at him, and he knew it with a certainty that had nothing to do with his eyes and everything to do with a feeling in his chest he didn't have a name for.
The wards came back. Flickering, uneven, humming at a pitch that hadn't been there before. A pitch that settled into Dorian's molars and stayed.
Corwin was staring at the ward array. His sword was still in his hand, still wet. His face held an expression Dorian had never seen on his father before. Dorian recognized it anyway, the way you recognize a word in a language you don't speak. It was the look of a man doing arithmetic he already knew the answer to.
The wards were damaged. The nearest trained Wardcrafter was in Redmarch, three days by armed caravan. The Church hadn't responded to the last four repair requests. The wards would hold tonight. Probably tomorrow. Maybe next week.
Corwin cleaned his blade on Henrik's coat. He sheathed it. He turned to the militia, and his face was his face again — steady, reliable, the wall behind the wall.
"Resume patrol. Double watch on eastern section until dawn. Dorian, go home."
"I can take the extra—"
"Go home."
Dorian went.
The walk was ten minutes. He passed the militia hall, dark. He passed the shrine, where Father Aldren's light was on because the surge would have woken every Ichor-sensitive person in the settlement, and Aldren was probably trying to figure out what his instruments were telling him. He passed the Drace house, shutters closed. He passed Henrik's house.
The lamp was on. Through the window, a woman sat at a table, mending something. She looked up when Dorian's boots scraped the road. She looked at him through the glass. She smiled the way you smile at a neighbor's kid walking home from a late shift — casual, automatic, already looking back down at her work.
She didn't know yet. Nobody had told her. Henrik had been talking about her cooking thirty minutes ago, and now Henrik was a shape under a tarp on the eastern wall, and his wife was mending a shirt he would never wear.
Dorian walked home. The ward hum followed him, settled in his teeth, and stayed.
The light was on in his kitchen. Through the window, his mother was at the counter. His sister was beside her, drawing on something. Warmth bled through the doorframe.
He went inside. He didn't mention Henrik. He ate what was on the table. He went to bed. He lay in the dark and listened to the wards hum their new, wrong song, and he did not sleep for a long time.