Since the weather magics were too dangerous to leave unguarded and easily absorbed, she used Olken crystal as a repository for the incants and sigils and protected them with copious wardings. Drove herself to the brink of breaking, for the powerful incants resisted their caging.

After careful thought, she crafted another incant, this one to let a mage see through Lur’s wall, once it was raised. For a locked room without a window was not a safe thing.

As she laboured over her legacy, waiting and hoping for Remmie to return, she left Venette to take charge of everything else. The forming of a new Council. The finding of a place for the Doranen to create their own township. The creation of the incant that would blank the Olken’s magic from their minds and memories, as though it had never been. A difficult decision, that was… but Lur was better safe than sorry. There was the code of justice that would allow Doranen and Olken to live side by side in peace. And a second code, the Doranen code, that would ensure no ruinous magics would ever be used again. That meant they must sift through their history of mageworks, deciding what to discard and what to keep.

And in their careful sifting, become better mages than they had been.

All of that, Barl left to Venette. Trusting her to do what was right, as she was trusted to make them safe. She worked, she ate, and in brief snatches she slept. Because time was running out, Morgan still lived, she was sure of it… and Remmie hadn’t returned.

Bound in Barl’s magic, bound with cruelty and failed love, Morgan turns his swiftly growing strength to the destruction of her warding. It is almost completed, his ruin of her plan to hold him, constrain him, deny him what is his. Every thought turns towards freedom. He has no time to touch her mind. But he can wait. He is patient. A pleasure deferred is a pleasure prolonged. It is a lesson she has taught him, a lesson he has learned—

The shock of the knife sliding into his chest was so great, Morgan almost lost his grasp of Barl’s final, frayed binding incant. The invading blade was long and narrow and brutally sharp. He’d felt a blade like that before. Once. A lifetime ago, it seemed. When someone had tried to murder his darling. His dravas. The mageworked child of his heart.

Now, as then, he repudiated the insult. Used Dorana’s tainted, transformed magics to heal his rudely pierced flesh. And as he did so, rage surged through him.

Who seeks my life? Who dares raise a hand to Morgan Danfey?