From the beginning, Scar's awakening of his Emotional State had been off. The procedure prior to it had been bizarre, departing from everything considered normal in ways that were hard to ignore.
And what followed was stranger still. No runic mark. No sigils. None of the usual markers confirmed what had happened.
Even more bizarrely, the knowledge Scar had pulled from his confrontation with Kendrick, his first predecessor, carried something beneath it that he hadn't fully processed until now.
A quiet implication, subtle but clear once he looked at it directly. The ability to decay didn't belong to him.
The pieces clicked into place. The reason his body decayed whenever he used the flames of decay… that had always been a troubling inconsistency, and now it made sense.
But solving one mystery had a way of surfacing another, and the one now sitting at the front of his mind was the larger of the two. What was he, exactly?
