The chains were searching for something to hold, so Noah lay still and let them look.
He could feel them moving through him, weaving deeper into the territory that most magic never reached. They were looking for his soul. The complete, unified thing that a compulsion needed to sink its roots into if it was going to hold.
What they found instead was wreckage.
If only they knew that Osiris had long since shattered his soul into pieces. The shattering had taken place after months of brutal torture, and what remained of Noah's soul was not a single surface but a collection of fragments, each one separate, and each one capable of functioning independently but none of them the whole.
A compulsion needed something complete to bind to. You couldn't chain a shattered thing. The pieces would simply shift and the chain would find nothing.
But he needed to give them something if he wanted to slip out of their grip.
