(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

The Cinder King jogs after Union for a stretch, but even with all his stolen Investiture he cannot catch a city that has decided to leave him. Nor can he outrun the sun: Zellion has tried. He pulls up, breathing hard, and turns back. Zellion watches the dawn light pick out the wildness in his eyes and finds, for the first time in many beatings, that he is grinning.

What follows is laid out by his opponent as a transaction. *Summon that armour again and give it to me.* Zellion cannot, and says so; the cracked, exhausted body in the mud is doing what it can. *Then I will kill you.* You'll die for it, Zellion tells him, and gets, for once, a reasoned answer back. The Cinder King has, in his off-hours, been reading. The book he found describes the weapon — the offworlder's sword — that is left at its bearer's side when the bond falls. Kill Zellion, take the blade, become unkillable on this world. He has also worked out, on his own, what the second weight on the scale is: a shield hanging over the Beaconites sheltered in the dark zone. He names it casually, as proof of what he has on the offworlder. When Zellion dies the dome will go.

Then the cold begins. The Cinder King kneels and takes Zellion's head in both hands and starts pulling heat through the skin, the practised draw he has used on every captive he has ever fed his cinderheart from. Frost spreads on the inside of Zellion's bones; his heart stutters in irregular thuds; his vision dims at the edges. The man over him talks while he drains, easily, like a sermon. He will take the offworlder's weapon. He will be immortal. When Union is recovered the crew will see him at last for what he is. He will flay every traitor on the bridge with their own names ringing in their ears. He will unify the whole of Canticle into one perfect city ruled by one man, with one sword.

Zellion dies a little more under each sentence. But the inventory of his oaths, looked at as he is freezing, is not empty. He did not promise the Beaconites he would protect them — that was a thing he chose, not a thing he swore. What he did promise was Auxiliary. *Go on*, Aux had told him on the last sunrise, while burning his own personality away to do it. That promise is the weight on his side of the scale, and it is heavier than the cold. He reaches deeper than he has been able to in a long time and finds, instead of redemption, something a little like remembrance — the same impulse that had once carried him into the sky in the first place.

He puts his own hands on the wrists draining him. He has only one trick left and it is one he has never said aloud. He whispers an altered prayer into the contact between them: *bold one on the threshold of death, give me your heat, that it may bless those who still deserve it.* The Cinder King laughs — *a prayer to the dead?* No, Zellion tells him. *To the dying.* And he pulls.

His Torment — the Investiture-leeching half of the scar a Dawnshard left on his soul — turns the prayer inside out and runs the heat the other way. The flow inverts. The Cinder King gasps, tries to wrench free, finds the grip on his wrists is not negotiable; the plants around them brown and writhe as the sun reaches them; his struggle goes from contemptuous to frantic. The reservoir is enormous. He has been taking heat from his subject cities for years without ever paying any back, and all of that hoard pours now into the man at his feet — a debt called in all at once. The glow in his eyes guttering down to ordinary hazel. The cinderheart in his chest dimming to a dead gem. The screams getting smaller. *The trouble with tyranny*, Zellion tells him as he comes apart, *is that there is always someone stronger.*

The take is more than enough. Without Aux there to murmur the threshold reading for him, Zellion reads it himself: well over one hundred percent Skip capacity, and probably comfortably past it. He misses, in that moment, the deadpan voice telling him so for what would have been the last time. He wishes the Cinder King a happy first sunrise — it will, he tells him, be the best one he ever sees in his life — and the dawn arrives. Skin shrivels to ash; eyes hiss steam and burst; the figure who ruled Union for years burns down to nothing on the muddy ground where his own city left him.

In the same instant Zellion triggers the Torment in its other mode, spends the stockpile in a single push, and Skips outward into the cosmere. His journey continues.