"It is old. Older than the Reza's occupation of my world. Old enough that most Falmeri today only know it as a phrase their own grandmothers used to frighten children away from powers they weren't ready to touch.
"It was never, in the stories I was raised on, a cost that accrued from use.
...it accrued from breaking.
"A wielder who took a wound to the part of themselves the power lived in, not the body, the part underneath the body, and who kept using the power anyway, without ever letting that wound close, would find the debt no longer waited politely to be spent on purpose. It would begin collecting itself. Fear. Memory. Grief revisited too many times without being allowed to finish grieving.
"The stories say it doesn't distinguish between a choice and a wound. It only knows that something underneath the wielder is open. And an open thing, left open long enough, simply keeps bleeding. Whether anyone's using it or not."
The room had gone very still.
"And if it reaches the palm," Taisen said. "What then."
Venemis did not answer immediately, and the not answering, more than anything she could have said, told him the shape of what was coming.
"The stories disagree on the exact ending," she said finally. "Which is, I think, the honest way stories admit that no one who reached it ever came back to correct the version being told.
"Some say the hand simply stops answering. Forever. The power gone, the way a limb goes numb past saving. No more debt, because there's nothing left in that hand willing to spend.
"Some say worse.
"That the ash doesn't stop at the palm. That it keeps going. Wrist. Arm. Further. That whatever it is, underneath the body, the power actually lives in, simply runs out, the way a candle runs out, and the person wearing the body goes on standing there for a while afterward. Walking. Speaking. Looking, to anyone watching, entirely like themselves.
"Until they don't anymore.
"All at once. The way a candle doesn't dim before it goes dark.
It simply goes dark."
"You believe the second version," Taisen said. It wasn't a question.
"I believe I don't know," Venemis said, "and I believe that not knowing, for a man in your position, is considerably more dangerous than either version being true outright, because a known danger can be planned around, Commander. An unknown one only makes you afraid in a way that costs you clarity precisely when you need it most."
"Is there anything," he said, quieter now, "in any of it, that says whether it can be closed. The wound. Whatever's open underneath."
She studied him a long moment, and something in her face, careful and old, eased into something that looked, briefly, almost like the ghost of a teacher's patience for a student who had finally asked the right question instead of the frightened one.
"There is one thing," she said. "A rite, not a cure, older even than the phrase itself, that my grandmother only ever half taught me, because she died before she judged me ready for the rest of it, and I have spent every year since half wishing she'd judged faster and half grateful she hadn't, because the parts I do know frighten me considerably more than the parts I don't. It requires trance. It requires a Falmeri third eye to hold open a door the wielder cannot see through on their own, and it requires more time and more stillness than a ship at war with itself in the Fold is likely to afford either of us. I won't promise you it works, Commander. I won't even promise you I remember enough of it to attempt it safely. I will promise you this: if you want to try, I will give you every piece of it I actually have, freely, and I would rather fail trying to close that wound for you than succeed at nothing at all while it keeps eating your hand in front of me."
Taisen looked at his own palm a long moment, grey climbing steady and cold, and felt something in his chest that he recognized, distantly, as the particular vertigo of being offered help by the one person aboard this ship he had the least earned reason to trust with anything at all, and found, feeling it, that he trusted the offer anyway, not because he'd decided to forgive her, but because fear, he had learned across two lifetimes, made for a considerably more honest teacher than gratitude ever had.
"When this crossing settles," he said, "and there's time enough to do it properly, and not one moment before, because I won't spend what little stillness this ship has left on a rite neither of us fully understands while we're still deciding whether Fleet Marshal Zhang is alive. I'll hold you to the offer. I want you to know that I'm not forgetting it."
"I wouldn't expect you to," Venemis said. "Forgetting isn't a thing either of us seems built for, Commander, whatever else separates us."
They reached the derelict listening post the charts still called Corvid's Rest on the fifth day of the crossing, a scarred, unmanned relay platform tucked into the gravitational shadow of a gas giant far enough from any inhabited system that Fleet Command's own patrol schedules rarely bothered to sweep it, and Taisen composed the message to Zhang alone in his quarters, twice, discarding the first draft entirely because it read, on the second pass, like a man trying too hard to sound as if he weren't afraid, and the second because it read like a man who'd overcorrected into sounding afraid of everything at once.
The third version, he judged, was honest without being reckless, and he sent it before he could talk himself into a fourth.
Marshal. I have new information I cannot confirm and cannot fully explain the source of, beyond saying it did not come from a friendly channel and I have reason to believe it was not offered to me freely by accident. The leak you're hunting isn't above your authority. It's inside your own trust. Someone close enough to see what you see, close enough that you haven't thought to look at them yet, precisely because looking would mean doubting a relationship you've never had cause to doubt before. I don't know who. I wish I did. I'm telling you this knowing it may be exactly the kind of poisoned gift my source would enjoy watching you drink, and telling you anyway, because I would rather you drink it carefully than not drink it at all and walk blind into whatever comes next.