“Neverah!”
Solmir lurched toward her, bounced over the ground like a coin in a tin cup. He skidded around the opening chasms, kicking up clouds of gray dust. The whole not-quite-sky filled with the sound of breaking earth, collapsing dirt. A world shuddering itself apart.
He launched across the ground, landed next to her in a crouch. “Forgive me for the impropriety, Your Majesty,” he hissed, then scooped her up and jumped across the growing fissure to a larger piece of solid earth. The landing made him stumble, and they sprawled onto the dirt, his arms braced next to her temples. The back of Neve’s head slammed against the earth, hard enough to make her vision blur and pain spangle through her skull.
Wafts of black smoke billowed from the chasms like smoke from yawning mouths, curling up toward the gray mist that made the false sky. The chittering sound of it cut through the groan of the shattering ground—loose magic, untethered from the world by its breaking.
Solmir sprang up, standing over her like a predator defending its kill. His hands arched in the air, and with a roar, he called all that rogue magic in.
It was like watching someone be attacked by a swarm of wasps. The senseless, formless chittering sounds grew to a crescendo as the magic swooped toward Solmir, flowing into his open palms and shadowing him from fingertip to elbow, then higher. It came and kept coming, a seemingly endless wave billowing up from the ground and into his waiting hands.
He screamed as it happened, a harsh sound that could’ve been pain or anger or both, and it scared Neve more than anything else she’d heard in this underworld, anything else she’d seen. It was the sound of someone unraveling, and she closed her hands over her ears to drown it out.
Through it all, the ground kept shaking. The solid island where they were stayed intact, but the edges crumbled slowly, safety sloughing away as Solmir stood there and screamed and absorbed more darkness than anyone should be able to hold.
And then, finally, the rush of shadows stopped. Solmir crumpled, knees and hands hitting the dust, back heaving as inky darkness slithered over his skin, flickered like inverse fireflies. Thorns, finger-long, pricked through his arms, ripping up the fabric of his shirt. Claws curved where his nails should be.
A fallen god made a monster.
Neve scuttled backward, away from him, away from the twisted shape he was saving her from becoming. She thought of that strange dream she’d had in the cabin, the reflection of herself in the mirror.
Slowly, Solmir looked up. Fangs dug into his bottom lip, his teeth grown long and sharp. Black had swallowed the whites of his eyes, but his irises were still a burning, terrible blue. The signifier of his soul, still within him, still fighting.
But as he looked at her, the blue flickered.
He lurched to stand on unsteady feet, legs grown longer than they should be, strangely jointed. Even so, Solmir retained his stately grace as he stalked across the broken earth toward her, expressionless except for the involuntary sneer his too-long teeth pulled his mouth into.
Desperate to put space between them, Neve slid over the dusty ground, hands behind her. But one hand fell into empty space, almost making her lose her balance—nowhere to go, nowhere to run.
So she made herself stand, pulled to her full height, hiding the tremble in her jaw as the monster came closer.
Bare inches away from her, Solmir stopped. Shadows writhed in his eyes, but the blue held on, though she could see from the shudder of his muscles that it was a physical effort.
One clawed hand stretched toward her face, frosted with thin ice, stopping just before it touched her skin. Neve refused to flinch, refused to look away from Solmir’s eyes, blue flickering to black and back again. She didn’t know what he would do, swallowed up in darkness, the barest threads of humanity he’d held on to fraying under the strain. She didn’t know, but she wouldn’t show him fear.
Calculation in his eyes, a familiar emotion in his changed face. Solmir’s claws fell away from her, as if a decision had been made. In the same moment, he turned, hands thrusting out into the gray air, and a shower of brambles pulsed from him, as thick and fast as blood from a sliced artery.
The flow of it lessened gradually, thorns dissolving into gray smoke as they left his hands. Solmir crumpled, knees hitting the cracked earth, back heaving as magic-made brambles poured from his fingers. The claws retracted, the darkness of his veins faded away. She didn’t have to see his face to know the black eyes were blue again, his teeth blunted.
He’d become a monster, then bled the monster out. Humanity was such a transient thing here.
“Why did you do that?” Neve asked, a whisper that carried in the empty plain. “Why did you absorb all that magic if you knew it was going to do… to do that?”
There was worry in her voice. She didn’t have the energy to try to hide it.
“Because if I didn’t, it would’ve gone to the Kings.” Solmir straightened slowly. He ran a hand over his hair, like he was afraid the minutes he’d spent as a monster had mussed it. “This way, even if we had to waste some of it, it would at least be used up so they couldn’t have it.”
He looked like himself again, a too-handsome man with too-cold eyes. “What were you doing?” Neve asked, still quiet, still worried. “When you came over to me…”
Solmir blinked. Turned his eyes away, just by a fraction, looking over her shoulder instead of at her face. “I was going to give you some of the magic,” he said, clipped and emotionless, despite the slight tremor in his jaw. “It was too much, nearly to the point of overwhelming me, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to let it go.”
“Why didn’t you?”
A pause before he answered, the column of his throat bobbing with a swallow. “Because you were terrified, Neverah,” he said. “And the magic was such that I could only pass you enough to make any difference by kissing you. I wasn’t going to do that. Not with the way you were looking at me.”
Then he brushed past her, headed into the endless gray horizon. Neve frowned after him a moment before following.
Carefulness, consideration. Things he’d shown her on the surface, things that felt somehow dangerous here. She didn’t want his care—it made things too complicated—but she was afraid of how this world would be for her if she didn’t have it.
They walked in silence for a while before she spoke again, not quite sure how to phrase the question. “Your eyes…”
His pointer finger worked at the silver ring on his thumb as he walked, turning it in nervous revolutions. “What about them?”
“They almost went black, too.”