THE ALPHA'S RUIN
She held until the sweat was running down her face and her arms were shaking and the four frequencies in her were running at a level she had not touched since the ritual circle.
And then the corruption gave.
All seven tablets.
Simultaneously.
The dark residue dissolved and the inscriptions went blank and the magic encoded in three generations of bloodline documentation became the same formlessness as everything else in the room and was gone.
Marina stepped back.
The room was clean.
Every channel on every surface, floor and wall and ceiling and housing, stripped of corruption, the stone beneath it just stone, old and dense and ordinary.
She stood in the center of the clean room and breathed.