He did not anticipate you throwing yourself at him with the only biddable bone you had left, which was your own. Great spurs burst through the heels of your hands from your carpal bones, and you slashed, wildly, at his chest, at his face, at the arm holding the crimson-ribboned rapier. You had extended your curved, bloodied talons of trapezoid and capitate into him, through the fabric of his shabby shirt, into the meat of his pectoral muscles, before he bounced your head back against the doorjamb. The back of your skull smashed into the steel casing, but he was falling back, and he was taking you with him. As Ortus staggered over the threshold into the bedroom you had a split second’s perception of your broken wards lying in heaps and desiccated clumps by the door, your regenerating ash all dried up on the threshold like so many ancient clags.
He dropped his sword to wrench your claws out of his chest, and you understood what he had done. He took your bloody spurs between his fingers, and the blood fell away into powder as he stripped away the thanergy. He did not absorb it or try to turn it back on you; he simply undid it, with the dismissive ease of upending a jug of water over a drain. The spikes of living bone, freshly grown from your own body, faded in seconds into brittle twigs. They snapped off in his hands and he tossed them aside.
Harrow the Ninth - Act Three, Chapter Twenty-Four
