There was nothing labyrinthine about putting the Spiritual Bond onto someone.

The System called the recipient the Bonded, which was—

’How magnificently, reductively crude.’

It felt like calling a woman you loved the Female or referring to dinner as the Caloric Intake.

But Phei didn’t have a superior designation prepared, and criticizing nomenclature you couldn’t improve upon was the particular province of men with too much opinion and insufficient vocabulary, so he let the semantic objection perish where it stood.

The mechanics were disarmingly elementary.

All he had to do was hold the person’s hand. Murmur the ability’s name. Done.

The Original Tongue runes inscribed onto the ring handled the rest — the attunement, the permanent binding, the invisible tethering of one soul’s awareness to another’s location and wellbeing across any distance existence cared to throw between them.

No incantation was needed. He had thought there would be some preparatory ritual, like blood drawn or oaths sworn beneath a solstice moon.

Just skin against skin and a word spoken softly enough that the universe heard it before anyone else did.

The irony of which was not lost on him.

Because it was, in its essential choreography, almost congruent to how he put the Slave Mark on people.

But not exactly the same — the Slave Mark required the forehead, the Spiritual Bond the hands, and the cosmic distance between I own you eternally and I will always find and protect you was roughly the width of the moral universe — but the surface resemblance was proximate enough to engender a disquietude about the recurring motif in his supernatural repertoire.

Hold someone. Say a name. Bind them to your Sense forever.

His life had a very specific aesthetic, and he was beginning to notice.

And not at all the same! He reminded himself.

While the Slave Mark was dominion, then the Spiritual Bond was protection. One was a leash. The other was a lantern of gaurdianship.

The fact that both commenced with physical contact and concluded with permanent metaphysical attachment was — coincidence.

’Yes, it is all cosmic coincidence.’

The actual application had been — well.

He hadn’t known how to explain a certain thing to his women, who had firstly cornered him with the synchronized investigative precision of two former adversaries who had discovered, in the span of a single evening, that their combined interrogation skills were considerably more formidable than either had wielded alone.

They asked him about ring on his thumb — that plain, mirror-silver band with its Original Tongue runes — had caught Melissa’s eye within approximately four seconds of his reappearance.

Roxanne had noticed it three seconds after that.

And the ensuing cross-examination regarding its provenance, composition, and the reason a seventeen-year-old boy was suddenly wearing jewellery that hummed with an energy neither of them could identify but both of them could feel had been conducted with the merciless thoroughness of a joint senate hearing.

He’d scratched his head...

...Before he held their hands.

And put the Bond on them. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

They perceived nothing.

Exactly as he’d hoped — otherwise he’d have been standing in Roxanne’s penthouse at an ungodly hour attempting to elucidate the finer points of Original Tongue runic artefacts to two women whose collective patience for unexplained supernatural phenomena had been tested enough for one evening.

The Bond settled into them silently and Imperceptibly as permanent tether woven into the substructure of their souls without so much as a tremor to herald its arrival.

But it was arduous to circumvent the intuitions of a woman. Nigh impossible, in point of fact, when the woman in question was Melissa Ryujin Tiamat.

Because while neither Roxanne nor Melissa had felt the Bond — while the artefact had performed its ancient work with the discretion of a master thief — they had both, absolutely and irrefutably, felt the change in him that wasn’t about the ring but his new power heights.

Melissa delineated it first and her voice had gone quiet — not alarmed, not affrighted, but appraising — and the words she chose landed with the clinical precision of a woman who had been around power her entire life and knew how to weigh it:

Endless. Dark. Suffocating, with a bloodlust threaded through it that sat beneath the surface like something predatory circling in deep water. And beneath all of that — beneath the darkness and the bloodlust — an infinity coldness.

The coldness of a void was after all not merely cold anymore. Void-cold and the temperature at which concepts stopped existing.

Roxanne had added — with the trembling, awed candour, she had spent twenty years in the proximity of powerful men and had never, until this moment, encountered anything that made the word powerful feel like a diminutive — that she felt as though with a single snap of his fingers Phei could annihilate them both into nothingness.

Them and the building and the city block the building stood upon, reduced to a silence so absolute that even the memory of sound would refuse to return.

Of course, he... wouldn’t.

They were right, though — about what they were sensing.

The Primordial Blood element and the Void-Ice Element, both of which he had recently and fully awakened, were emanating from him with the unconstrained ambience of two cosmic forces that had been emancipated from dormancy and were still, in a sense, stretching.

Getting comfortable in their new freedom:

...Announcing their presence in every room he occupied with the quiet, proprietary arrogance of tenants who had just signed a very long lease.

But while he could indeed annihilate the building with his Void-Ice — could fold it into the substrate of nonexistence with a thought and leave nothing, not even rubble, not even dust, or the chemical memory of the materials that had composed it — he was not as redoubtable as their senses were intimating.

After all, he was just a Master.

The only reason his presence registered as infinite and all-consuming was the Void-Ice Element itself — which he held dominion over independently of his power rank, which did not require him to be a Grandmaster or a Sovereign or a God to wield at its fullest devastating capacity, and which answered to Infinity Control with the obedient totality of a force that had recognized its legitimate sovereign and would not be diminished by the constraints of a power ranking system it predated by several aeons.