The Mask of Mirrors (Rook & Rose, #1)

by M.A. Carrick

Imbuing, which couldn’t be integrated with numinatria in a stable fashion. An inscriptor who imbued a numinat fed it their own energy, burning them from the inside out. That was how the river numinata worked for nearly two centuries, and why the broken one was a fucking nightmare to replace. That was what Alsius had been terrified Vargo would do tonight. And when a crafter inscribed a numinat on their work, it might make the product incredibly potent, but only for a few moments. Not long enough to be useful for a street drug. And certainly not the sort of thing that could— Vargo stopped dead in the street. Tyrant’s syphilitic nutsack—he’d been right the first time. “Ash isn’t imbued aža. It’s transmuted. Like prismatium.”