Sovereign Bangle Deepwoken ◎

Don’t command her , it purred. Persuade her. Let her see your side. Let her fall in love with you. Then, when she gives you the sigil freely, make her jump.

“What I should have done at the start,” Kaelen whispered. He could feel the Bangle screaming in his mind, a thousand needles of panic and rage. No! You are MINE! You cannot—

He’d cornered a lone Etrean Inquisitor—a woman who had been hunting him for a month, immune to the Bangle’s influence because of a forgotten, painstakingly inscribed sigil on her silver cuirass. She was out of tricks, her sword broken, her back against the chasm. He could have just killed her. It would have been clean. sovereign bangle deepwoken

The Inquisitor’s eyes widened. “What are you doing?”

Instead, he stepped backward.

The descent was rapid after that. He became a tyrant in a week. He used the Bangle to enthrall a crew of Deepwoken, turning their free will into a chorus of obedient drones. They sailed the Sea of Teeth, and wherever Kaelen went, smiles were painted on faces that had forgotten how to form them. He made a duke strangle his own court jester for a poorly timed joke. He made a mother sell her child for a shiny pebble. Each command felt like a splinter driving deeper into his soul.

Kaelen had never wanted the Bangle. He’d seen what it did to the others—the way their eyes went flat, their wills subsumed into the cold, singing metal. But in the depths of the Eternal Gale, with a Thresher’s maw closing around his leg and the blood seeping into the black salt water, a dying man doesn’t choose his salvation. He grabs it. Don’t command her , it purred

The breaking point came at the Obsidian Arch.