Dawn came grey and reluctant over the Abyssal Frontier, the way it always did, as if the sun itself had learned to be wary of this place. Vane had not slept. He sat in the command chair with his boots still on, sword propped against the desk, and watched the tent flap stir in the wind while a presence he still could not fully believe in kept up a quiet, running commentary on his vital signs.

*"Heart rate: seventy-two. Better,"* Eric said. *"You still haven't slept."*

"I don't sleep much," Vane said. "Occupational hazard."

*"That's not an answer, that's an excuse. When was the last time you had six consecutive hours?"*

Vane considered lying. He decided, for reasons he didn't examine too closely, not to bother. "I don't remember."

There was a pause — the kind of pause Vane was already learning meant Eric was recalculating something, adjusting a plan the way Vane adjusted a battle line. *"All right,"* Eric said finally. *"We'll come back to that. Right now I want to talk about what happened last night, because if the answer is 'that will keep happening,' I need to understand the mechanism before it kills you."*

"Bluntly put."

*"I'm a surgeon. Bluntness is a professional courtesy."*

Vane almost smiled. It was strange, how quickly he had adjusted to the rhythm of this — a voice in his chest that spoke to him like he was a difficult patient instead of the second most powerful sword in the Empire. No one else spoke to him that way. No one else would have dared.

He told Eric what he knew, which was little enough: the crystallization, the years of watching Bloodburst take men he respected, the way every physician and battle-mage in the Empire had failed to find a cure. He did not tell Eric about Constantine's face in the dirt, though he suspected, from the careful way Eric didn't ask further, that some of it had come through anyway — through whatever strange channel let a stranger feel Vane's pulse as his own.

*"So no one's ever tried actually clearing the crystal formations,"* Eric said slowly, thinking aloud in that clipped, clinical cadence Vane was starting to find almost soothing. *"They've only ever tried to suppress the magic buildup that causes them. That's like treating the symptom and ignoring the blockage."*

"You say that as if it's simple."

*"It's not simple. It's dangerous, and I don't fully understand the mechanics of whatever I am now, and if I get it wrong I could kill you faster than the condition would on its own."* A beat. *"But it's not impossible. Which is more than anyone else in this world seems to have offered you."*

Vane looked down at his own hand, remembering the crystal blade, the clean unclogged strength that had run through him like something newly born. "You did more than offer," he said. "You did it."

*"I did the first thirty seconds of it. There's more crystal in your system than I cleared. I could feel it, even after — sediment, deep in the smaller vessels near your spine. It's not urgent yet. But it will build again if you keep fighting the way you fight."*

"I don't have another way to fight."

*"Then we're going to need to find you one,"* Eric said, and there was something in the flatness of his voice that Vane was beginning to recognize as the sound of Eric caring about something and refusing to phrase it that way.

Vane studied the tent's canvas ceiling for a long moment, turning the strange shape of the last few hours over in his mind. It was absurd, he thought — a man who had faced down siege engines, rogue mages, and things that crawled out of tears in the world without flinching, now sitting quietly still while a disembodied voice told him to drink more water. And yet some old, exhausted part of him, the part that had spent eight years bracing for every conversation to end in an order or a demand, found itself simply grateful that this one hadn't.

"Why does it matter to you?" he asked, before he could stop himself. "Whether I live past this posting or not. You said yourself you don't understand what you are, or why you're here. You could have woken up in anyone's chest. Why does it matter whether the particular idiot you landed in survives?"

The silence that followed was not the clinical kind. *"I've asked myself that,"* Eric admitted. *"I don't have a clean answer. Maybe it's just habit — twenty years of not being able to look at a dying patient and think of anything except how to stop it. Maybe it's something else. I haven't decided yet whether I'm allowed to examine that too closely."*

"Allowed by whom?"

*"By me,"* Eric said, and didn't explain further, and Vane, recognizing the shape of a door being gently but firmly closed, didn't push.

---

The camp had questions, of course. A Marshal who walked away from a Bloodburst threshold with a weapon made of living crystal did not go unnoticed, and by midmorning half the frontline company had heard some version of the story, each more elaborate than the last. Some said a god had touched him. Some said he'd made a pact with a demon. One of the younger recruits, a boy barely seventeen who'd lied about his age to enlist, swore up and down that he'd seen a ghost step out of the Marshal's chest and cut down three Rift-Spawn with its bare hands, which was not, strictly, true, but was close enough to something true that Vane found he couldn't quite deny it with a straight face.

He gave the official story to his officers: an unknown magical artifact, activated under extreme duress, still being studied. It was, technically, not a lie. It simply left out the part where the artifact had opinions, and a bedside manner, and had spent the last several hours arguing with him about sleep hygiene.

Captain Marek, his second-in-command for the better part of six years and one of the few men Vane trusted with anything close to the truth, was not so easily satisfied. He fell into step beside Vane at the edge of the training yard, arms crossed, watching a squad of recruits drill with the wary expression of a man who had survived long enough to know when his commander was omitting something.

"That blade wasn't in the armory inventory," Marek said. "I'd know. I did the inventory myself last month."

"It isn't from the armory."

"No," Marek agreed. "It isn't from anywhere I recognize, which is the part that concerns me. You went down last night, Marshal. I saw it. Your knees buckled and I thought — " He stopped himself, jaw tight, and started again in a lower voice. "I thought it was finally happening. The way it happened to Constantine."

Vane said nothing for a long moment. Overhead, a hawk wheeled once against the grey sky and vanished toward the black mountains. "It very nearly was," he said finally. "Something intervened. I don't fully understand it myself yet. When I do, you'll be the first person I tell — after myself."

It wasn't the whole truth, but it wasn't a lie either, and Marek, who had served long enough under Vane to recognize the difference between a man withholding information out of malice and a man withholding it out of care, only nodded once, sharply, and let the matter drop. "See that I am," he said, and returned to the yard, and Vane felt something in his chest — the ordinary something, not the crystal something — ease slightly at having, for once, not had to lie outright to the one man who might have deserved better.

*"You trust him,"* Eric observed, once Marek was out of earshot.

"With my life. Which is more than I can say for most people wearing an Imperial insignia."

*"Then why not tell him everything?"*

"Because trust isn't the same as safety," Vane said. "The less he knows, the less he can be made to answer for, if it ever comes to that." He didn't say the rest of it — that he had learned, a long time ago, that the people he cared about tended to become leverage in the hands of anyone clever enough to notice, and that the kindest thing he had ever learned to do for the people under his command was keep them ignorant of exactly how much they mattered to him.

*"You're hiding me,"* Eric observed, once Vane was alone again, walking the perimeter with his hands clasped behind his back the way he did when he needed to think without an audience.

"I'm protecting you," Vane said, low, pitched only for whatever passed as Eric's ears. "You said it yourself — you don't fully understand what you are. If the crown's mages get wind of a foreign spirit fused to a Marshal's heart, they will not ask polite questions. They'll want to study you. Extract you. See if it can be replicated in someone more compliant."

Silence, for a moment. Then: *"That's not just tactics. That sounded almost personal."*

"It is personal," Vane said, and did not elaborate, and Eric — mercifully, or perhaps just clinically, filing it away as data rather than pressing on an open wound — let it go.

They walked the rest of the perimeter without speaking. It was, Vane noted with some private surprise, a comfortable silence. He could not remember the last time silence with another person hadn't felt like something to be endured.

---

By afternoon, Eric had begun what he privately termed, with the sort of dry humor Vane was slowly learning he possessed, a "treatment plan." It involved absurdly specific instructions — an hour of rest after any engagement that pushed Vane's heart rate past one hundred and sixty, hydration schedules, a demand that Vane actually eat something resembling three meals instead of whatever he could chew standing up between briefings.

"You're worse than my old drill sergeant," Vane said, around a mouthful of the dried ration bread he was eating specifically to make a point.

*"Your old drill sergeant wasn't trying to keep your aorta from tearing itself apart. Chew properly, you'll choke."*

"I have been eating unsupervised for twenty-eight years."

*"And your resting pulse suggests every one of those years took a toll you never let anyone else see. When's the last time you had a full physical examination? Not a battlefield triage. An actual examination."*

Vane thought about it, chewing slower now, if only to buy himself time to decide whether to answer honestly. "There was a court physician, once. Years ago. Before the frontier."

*"And?"*

"And he told the Chancellor I was fit for active duty within the hour, regardless of what he actually found. It didn't seem worth repeating the exercise."

The silence that followed had a different quality than Eric's usual thinking-silences — heavier, more deliberate, the kind Vane was learning to recognize as Eric holding back something sharper than he wanted to say aloud. *"That's not medicine,"* he said finally, tightly. *"That's a rubber stamp with a diploma."*

"That's the Empire," Vane said, without much feeling left in it after so many years. "Efficient above all things. A Marshal who can still lift a sword is a Marshal fit for duty, whatever else might be quietly falling apart underneath the armor."

*"Not anymore,"* Eric said. *"Not while I'm here."*

*"And doing it badly, from what I can tell. Your resting heart rate before I intervened was already elevated for someone your age and fitness level. Chronic stress, inadequate rest, and I'd bet inadequate caloric intake relative to your exertion. You've been quietly killing yourself years before any crystal had the chance to."*

Vane stopped chewing.

It wasn't said unkindly. If anything, it was said the way Eric said most things — plainly, as fact, without any attempt to soften it into something more palatable. But there was something underneath it, something Vane hadn't expected to hear in a voice that had, until yesterday, belonged to a complete stranger: real, unhidden concern, the kind that didn't ask anything of him in return.

"You say that like it's not what a Marshal's life requires."

*"I don't care what a Marshal's life requires. I care what your body can survive. Those aren't always the same thing, and it's my job to make sure you don't confuse them."* A pause. *"I've watched people work themselves into the ground because they believed their worth was measured by how much they could sacrifice before they broke. I don't intend to watch it happen twice."*

Vane went very still.

Twice. The word sat between them like something Eric hadn't meant to let slip, and Vane, for all his rough edges, was not so dull that he missed its weight. Somewhere, in a life this strange spirit had left behind entirely, there had been a first time — a body worked past its limit, a warning ignored until it could no longer be ignored, a death that had, apparently, followed. Vane did not ask. He filed it away instead, the way he filed away troop movements and supply shortages, information to be handled carefully and later, when the ground beneath it was steadier.

"You said you died at your operating table," he said instead, careful, testing the edge of the subject the way he'd test ice before trusting his full weight to it. "Was there no one to tell you the same thing you're telling me now?"

*"There were people who tried,"* Eric said, quietly. *"I was very good at not listening. Professionally, I mean. I could diagnose a stranger's heart failure from three symptoms and a look on their face, and somehow it never once occurred to me to apply the same standard to myself."*

"Physician, heal thyself," Vane murmured.

*"It's a nice phrase. Rarely practiced."*

*"That was too much,"* Eric said, after a moment, a note of something like retreat in his clinical tone. *"Forget I said it."*

"No," Vane said, quiet. "Say it again sometime. I don't think anyone's ever told me that before."

---

Night fell the way it always did on the Abyssal Frontier — abruptly, all at once, as though the sky simply gave up trying. Vane sat alone in his tent with a hand pressed to his chest, the way he'd caught himself doing more and more often, an unconscious habit forming faster than he could examine it.

"Tell me something," he said, into the quiet. "Not about my heart rate. Something true. About you."

There was a long pause, long enough that Vane began to wonder if he'd asked something Eric wasn't willing to give.

*"I died at my own operating table,"* Eric said finally, and his voice, for the first time since Vane had met him, lost some of its clinical polish, went quiet and unguarded in a way that felt like watching a fortress lower its gate for exactly one visitor. *"Heart attack, ironically. I'd been ignoring the warning signs for months because I didn't have time to be sick — there was always another surgery, another patient who needed me more than I needed rest. I told myself that was noble. Mostly it was just easier than admitting I didn't know how to exist without being useful to someone."*

"And now you're stuck being useful to me."

*"Now I choose to be useful to you,"* Eric corrected, gently, and something in Vane's chest — his actual chest, the physical organ Eric had spent all day lecturing him about — did something complicated and warm that had nothing to do with magic or crystal or Bloodburst.

"Careful, doctor," Vane said, low, almost fond. "Keep talking like that and I might start to like you."

He hadn't meant it as anything more than a tired man's half-joke, the kind of thing soldiers said to each other across a dying fire when the alternative was silence. But the moment it left his mouth he felt it land somewhere it hadn't quite been aimed, felt the small, traitorous lift of his own pulse that had nothing to do with exertion or fear, and understood, with the sudden clarity of a man watching a landslide begin from very far away, that he had just told the truth by accident.

*"Your heart rate just went up eleven beats,"* Eric said, and Vane could have sworn — absurdly, impossibly — that there was something like amusement in it. *"For the record. I'm noting it in your chart."*

"You don't have a chart."

*"I have excellent memory and no other hobbies currently available to me. Believe me, it's going in the chart."*

"A chart with one patient and one very bored physician."

*"One very thorough physician,"* Eric corrected. *"There's a difference, and I intend to prove it to you over the course of what I suspect will be a very long acquaintance."*

"Shut up," Vane said, without any heat at all, and closed his eyes, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, let himself drift toward sleep without bracing for what the dark might bring.

He dreamed, faintly, of white light and a steady beeping sound he had no memory to attach to, and somewhere in that borrowed dream a stranger's calm voice kept saying, *stay with me, stay with me,* to someone Vane understood, with the strange clarity dreams sometimes offer, was not himself at all. He woke once, near the deepest part of the night, disoriented and reaching instinctively for his sword before he placed himself — the tent, the frontier, the quiet — and found, to his surprise, that the ache in his chest that had lived there for years, dull and constant as a stone in his boot, had eased into something almost like peace.

*"Bad dream?"* Eric asked, soft, clearly having felt him wake.

"Not mine," Vane murmured, already half back under. "Yours, I think."

There was no answer to that. But the silence that followed felt, for the first time, like something shared rather than something merely endured, and Vane slept the rest of the night through without waking again — the longest unbroken rest he had managed in longer than he cared to count.