“They don’t need them, no, but it seems like most have them.” She frowned, spinning his ring. “And most of them aren’t particularly good, now that I think about it.”
He huffed a rueful laugh. “Then I’ll make one up.” Neve heard the slight thud of fingers drumming on his knees as he thought. “I guess ‘make sure it’s actually the sun and not a torch’ is too on the nose?”
It was her turn to make a rueful noise. “A bit.” The heavy ring turned around and around her thumb. “The moral,” she said finally, “is to make the most of the time you have, because chances are it will be shorter than you think.”
Silence, broken only by the soft sounds of their breathing. “Neve,” Solmir said finally, a breath above silence, “I—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was swallowed in the sound of rending stone. Their coral prison cracked open, seeping hazy gray light that made them both throw hands over their eyes. A gash appeared in the ceiling, wide enough for a tentacle to snake through.
It wrapped around Neve’s waist. Tugged.
Solmir was on his feet, teeth bared and eyes watering, lashing at the tentacle with the fist she’d just set back to rights. It did nothing—Neve felt her stomach flip as the tentacle pulled her through the crack in the coral ceiling, scraping her spine, the prison sealing itself closed again with a boom.
Her eyes stung and her vision blurred, unable to quickly recover from untold hours of utter darkness. The tentacle pulled her through the air and sat her down, her watering eyes unable to pick out anything but vague gray shapes.
Slowly, her eyes adjusted, feeling coming back into muscles made numb by close quarters. She sat on a finely upholstered chair, only slightly damp. Before her, a table.
Across from her, the Leviathan.
The god sat with long corpse-fingers folded beneath its rubbery chin, shark-black eyes avid. Thin ribbons of seaweed trailed off into the dark.
“Shadow Queen.” A wide smile, sharp teeth, black eyes. “We should talk.”
Gradually, her vision acclimated to light again, dim as it was. Gleaming place settings before her, surrounded by sumptuous foods the likes of which she hadn’t seen since a court dinner. The Leviathan—its corpse-puppet—sat across from her, watching her with blank, dead eyes.
But the sense she got from the massive god that pulled its strings was one of hunger. Hunger and curiosity.
The food before her, wine and bread and cheese, all looked perfect. But none of it was real. Illusions crafted by the god across from her, made to look like idealized versions of themselves. It was meant to comfort, Neve thought, but it did the opposite. That perfect wine was the exact opacity of blood, and in the gray-scale gloom, it was easy to imagine it would taste of copper instead of alcohol.
The seaweed threads at the corners of the Leviathan’s mouth pulled its lips back into a wide, sharp-toothed smile. “I know you’re not hungry, but I thought you might miss wine.”
Neve sat up straight, pulling the poise of a queen around her like a cloak, despite her tangled hair and bedraggled nightgown. “Good wine, yes.” She tapped a finger against the glass. “Not… whatever this is.”
“Thorny thing, you are. Both literally and figuratively.”
Her fists closed. Thorns pressed out from her forearms, tracking up darkened veins, catching the threadbare fabric of her skirt. She’d grown nearly used to the roil of shadowy magic in her center, the chill of it crouching at the edges of her mind, but the changes it wrought in her were still a shock every time she saw them.
The Leviathan’s sharklike eyes were hard to read, but she saw its head tilt toward her hand as if it noticed something. Solmir’s silver ring, glinting on her thumb. “What a hold you have on each other,” it murmured.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Not her strongest rebuttal, but Neve couldn’t let something like that hang in the air unchallenged. It was too vulnerable, like an organ pulsing outside the boundaries of a body.
“Oh, but I think you do.” One of the Leviathan’s hands dropped to the table, the other propping up its tilted head. It was a posture one would adopt while speaking freely to a friend, and seeing it on the corpse of the Leviathan’s once-human lover made her stomach knot. “You were there, Neverah Valedren. In the nexus between the worlds, with the sister who would do anything to bring you home, and you chose to stay.” Its smile widened. “Strange, how you and she toss roles back and forth. Savior and saved, villain and victim. Though you’re the only one who’s ever truly been a villain, aren’t you?”
Her jaw firmed. She didn’t respond.
“So I suppose it’s not that odd, after all, how you and the once-King are drawn together.” The Leviathan lifted a piece of bread, bit into it with those rows of shark teeth. The glamour on it wavered just as it entered its mouth—a gray, spongy mass of seaweed, making Neve glad she hadn’t tried the wine. “You both have experience being villains in complicated stories. Shouldering complicated mantles. Like that of the Shadow Queen.”
The god fell quiet. For a moment, silence, then the slam of something colliding with stone.
Neve’s head whipped around to follow the sound. The prison the god had built for them in an instant was a knot of spiking stone and coral, impenetrable and solid in the middle of the cavern. Another slam came from inside.
“Let him out.” It seethed from behind her teeth, an order she hadn’t meant to give. “It’s cruel to keep him in there.”
“You care enough for him to be treated kindly? After everything he’s done?” The Leviathan sounded positively delighted. It took a sip of not-wine. “No, I believe I will leave our once-King where he is for now. Let him cool off.”
A swallow worked down her dry throat. Neve almost reached for the wineglass by reflex, but then remembered the mess of seaweed the bread had turned into when the Leviathan ate it. Her hand curled back in on itself, empty.
“You’ve complicated things for him,” the Leviathan said quietly, with an air of someone thrilled to be delivering bad news. “Made it all so much more layered. This was never going to be an easy thing for either of you, but you’ve made it positively tragic.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve brought me out here to tell me anything useful.” Spine rigid, voice cold, a queen to her dark-wreathed bones. “I’d think gloating was below a god.”
“And I’d think you’d have learned enough of gods in your time here to realize that nothing is below us.” The Leviathan shrugged, the movement made jerky by the seaweed filaments attached to its shoulders. “Divinity is less complex than humans would like to think. Half magic, half belief. You don’t become a god until you think of yourself as one.” Another shark-sharp grin. “And I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think myself a god, worthy of worship.”
“You haven’t been worshipped in eons.”