The wound no longer bleeds. That is what the healers say, and I believe them. The flesh has closed, the bone has knit, the breath comes without pain if I respect its limits. By all outward measures, I am alive in the way the living are meant to be.
Something else remains.
I notice it in quiet moments. In places where fire once answered without thought. Where the body obeyed and the will followed without delay. There is a pause now. A resistance. Like a door that opens only after being jostled. I have not spoken of this. Even with her. Right now? I do not intend to.
Magnus did not merely attempt to kill me. He left behind an imbalance. Not a curse. Not a sickness. A question that refuses to settle.
Fire still burns. It always will. But fire erases. It cleans by destruction. I have stood over too many ruins where the answers were reduced to ash along with the guilt, and I have begun to understand that destruction, while necessary, is often incomplete.
There are things that linger whether we sanction them or not. Bonds that do not dissolve simply because a heart has stopped. I have seen others exploit that truth with enthusiasm and cruelty. I have also seen how poorly prepared we are to stop them when we refuse to understand the mechanism.
Ignorance is a luxury the law cannot afford.
I have begun reviewing sealed material. Not to pursue mastery. Not to extend what already exists. To identify seams, stress points, and failures. To know precisely how such workings unravel when subjected to authority instead of fear. I take no satisfaction in this work. That, I find, is the only reassurance worth trusting.
Because I know what power does when left to appetite.
Before I set a single working in motion, I set limits. Five constraints. Absolute. Not because the magic demands them, but because I do.
I.
There will be no permanent dead raised by my hand. What has ended must remain ended. Anything compelled beyond its proper state will be dismantled deliberately and without delay.
II.
No sentient spirit will be bound for labor or for war. The dead are not assets. If they are involved at all, it will be as witnesses, and only when testimony is otherwise impossible and lawfully required.
III.
There will be no experimentation. I will not innovate, refine, or improve upon these workings. This knowledge is to be studied so it may be neutralized, not cultivated so it may grow roots.
IV.
Every use must answer to a purpose that can be stated plainly and defended publicly: an investigation, a judgment, or a prevention. If necessity cannot be named, then it does not exist.
V.
And I will watch myself without mercy. The moment this work feels 'good'. The moment it feels clean. The moment it feels easy? That will be the moment it stops. Convenience is how lines are crossed without noticing.
This is not a path I intend to walk forward upon. It is a boundary I am choosing to stand on, so that others cannot cross it unseen.
If this journal is ever read and taken as a confession of ambition, then I have failed to write clearly. Power is not what keeps me awake. What keeps me awake is the thought of standing over another ruin and realizing, too late, that I could have known better and chose not to.
The law was never clean work.