He caught Baldwin's sword on the scythe haft at close range and turned the blade off Finn's line. He Grave Stepped to a corpse eleven meters out and came back into the flank. He cut the red light away from the wound twice more and made it fail to settle both times.
And every collision between the black blade and the red reinforcement did something to him.
The cold around him stopped being weather and started being *his*. It came up his arms out of the haft instead of down into it, and somewhere in the fourth or fifth exchange James stopped noticing the weight of the weapon entirely.
Then the pressure arrived behind his eyes, and it was not Death Chain's strain, and something began forming in the air behind his head.
[DEATH AUTHORITY MANIFESTATION: PARTIAL]
The broken eclipse came back — the black ring, cracked along its arc, leaking thin silver-black light into the space above his shoulders, exactly as it had in a throne room three months ago.
