The wards recognized threat. Activated defensive protocols. Light consolidated into barriers that should have annihilated anything touched by transformation. Divine law asserting that corruption would be purified, that chaos would be ordered, that defiance would be corrected.

The Black Flame didn't resist the wards.

It infected them.

Azrael's consciousness flowed through the network like water finding cracks. Where the wards were solid divine law, he was liquid uncertainty. Where they ...