Merritt put a finger and thumb together at a spot in the structure and as if pinching the air itself pulled a radiant line all the way from the glowing scaffolding out and down across the Grace until he attached it at the end of one of the rays from the star where it crossed the circle representing the world of the dead.

Magda gasped as she flinched. She gritted her teeth against the stabbing pain. It felt like someone had pushed a knitting needle through her left side and taken a big stitch. She struggled to breathe against the pain bearing down on her.

Merritt quickly returned to the opposite side of the structure and pulled another line of light from the scaffolding to the end of a ray on that side, where it crossed over into the underworld.

Magda gasped again as she felt another stitch at her waist, but this time on the right side. When Merritt pulled the next line of light across the Grace, Magda felt yet another stitch of pain sear through her in the small of her back. She put her hands to the pain, urgently wanting to make it stop, but it didn’t.

Overhead dark, cloudy shapes had begun to swirl around the glowing structure of the verification web. Threads of lightning flickered from the framework to the shapes moving in a circle high above it as Magda felt yet more stitches of pain knitting around her waist coinciding with Merritt pulling lines of light out past the veil on the Grace. She felt as if she were being sewn to the ground. She could hardly move, hardly breathe.

Above them, the lightning in the clouds had the whole sky boiling with a writhing greenish light that seemed to be spreading through the firmament.

She saw, then, that the sword had begun to glow with a soft light that pulsed between a warm yellow and a green color not unlike that green light deep within the clouds overhead.

Merritt dropped to his knees, drawing yet more spell-forms at various places in the Grace. Magda couldn’t move and could barely pull each shallow breath through gritted teeth. She felt as if she were being torn in half.

The rotating dark mass over the structure grew in breadth as it revolved until it seemed like the entire sky was moving above her. The farthest-out parts rotated more slowly. The closer in toward the glowing web, the faster they spiraled around. At the center a point of intense greenish light flared.

Magda realized that the green color was not merely in the clouds. It seemed as if the very air itself was becoming the same strange tint of green.