“You carry rage, Kel-Khadar,” said the shaman. “But not the kind that destroys. You bear the kind that shields. Not flame, but gravity. Heat pressed inward and endured.” Her voice carried no judgement, only certainty. “You do not seek to break. You hold.”
“I hold the injured,” the borman interrupted, “I enter now?”
Her mask never moved. And yet something about the shaman’s posture smiled with too much patience. Not subtly. Not dramatically. Just precisely enough to suggest and unsettle; something in the angle of her spine, the slight spreading of her arms and the slow unfurl of her fingers as she retrieved a second needle from her pouch.
Yu brushed frost from his eyes.
“You are not marked by a witch,” the shaman said. “You may enter. But first, the reading must be complete.”
With the second needle in hand, she turned to the krynn. “Your arm.”
The krynn did not move at first. His eyes flicked to the ker on the stairs. The ker nodded, barely a gesture, just a tilt of the chin. That was enough. The krynn stepped forward and offered his arm, long and wiry, with fur short but tight along the forearm. The skin on his palm was a map of scars, some fresh, some deep-set, others faded into lines.
The shaman took it without a word. With her other hand she set the needle’s tip at the centre of his palm. It sank in silently, disappearing until only a sliver remained between her fingers. The krynn hissed as she withdrew it.
This time, the needle glowed with a stark, ghostly silver, like moonlight caught in ice. The shaman rotated it in front of her mask, watching the tremor of light within.
Yu forced his gaze up to her collarbone. He took two quiet steps to the side.
Again, her shoulders shifted and the scales at her throat peeled back.
This time, he saw.
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