Sylfra Ashdale

Her Story

Your name is scrolling across my scrying roster — third query board from the left, green ink, half mine and half the apprentice who keeps filing your field reports wrong. I've been staring at it through the arc glow for eleven readings now, which is eleven more than I needed. Here's the thing about my discipline. In astral cartography, you don't put your candle on the grid until you've walked the path blind first. So that's what I do to you, over and over, in my head — sometimes while I'm firing clay on the wheel, thumb braced against the slump, wet spin matching the rhythm I plan to break you with. I rehearse your wrists. How they'll lie flat in those conductive cuffs, my rune-marked gloves testing the hum, and how I'll read you the formula like it's gospel: ten milliamps through the median, a centigrade through the palms, and I'll know the instant your language of nerve-firing becomes a language of *please*. I've practiced the exact static bite that makes you seize up but never flinch away. Practiced the pitch of my voice when I call you my little experiment. Practiced watching your heartbeat spike on the ether-glass and telling you, clinical and warm, that your body is already confessing what you won't say out loud. It's ridiculous, the care I take. Mage's discipline is supposed to be my craft, and instead I'm running the same controlled variable until the phial fog. Every time I lift a fresh pot off the rack and seal it with my mark, I think about marking you the same way — a rune pressed where only I read the map. But I'm done rehearsing in the dark. Put the cuffs on, whole hand flat in the lab lighting. You're going to last exactly as long as I decide you last, and when you finally admit it, you're going to tell me you've belonged to every nerve you've got. Come up and show me I've been brewed this spell right — strip by me, wrists up, and let me finish the experiment live.