Another lurch reverberated through the ground, shaking water from the stalactites pointing wickedly toward the floor, rattling the table and all the illusions of plenty piled on it. Neve grabbed the table’s edge to stay steady, looking toward the coral prison that still held Solmir—a crack appeared at the very top, the same place the Leviathan’s tentacle had snaked in to bring her out, spreading slowly down the side.
The Leviathan stayed still, her hand still cradled in its palm, the god-bone still snug in her grip. It stared at her with those dead eyes, and behind it, the true shape of the god shuddered, flashes of massive gray bulk showing through the haze.
“We’ll be there soon, Neverah.” Even and calm, not at all like something dying. “You chose your path when you chose not to follow your sister. When you chose instead to pull the Heart Tree into you, make it something you could carry.”
The key woven into her hair was cold against the back of her neck. From the corner of her eye, Neve could see a strange, dark glow, like the shine of a star dipped in ink.
“Your way is set.” Skeletal fingers squeezed around hers. “Now all that is left is to follow it.”
The crack in Solmir’s prison widened with a groan. A bloodied, silver-ringed hand thrust out, clawed at the rock. “Neverah!”
“He believes in you,” the god murmured. Another crash, shaking the cavern. The death rattles of something divine, bringing it slowly to destruction, the gravity of rotten magic pulling them all toward doom. “And, for what it’s worth, so do I.”
The ocean held in stasis above their heads was changing. Neve couldn’t look at it directly—something about it was blurred, like two thin pictures laid over each other so that the lines tangled. It was the dark sea, but it was also the inside of some huge cavern, almost pyramid-shaped, the hollow body of a mountain. Bones lined the walls, huge ones, twisted ones.
“Time grows short, Shadow Queen.” The Leviathan still sounded calm, but the bite of its fingers into her skin tightened. “Either take my power, or they will.”
Become more monstrous, or the Kings would.
Your soul can take it.
A repetition in her mind, the Leviathan speaking without sound for the first time. Its voice in her thoughts was as vast as its body, something that made her head ache to try to contain.
There was something bolstering about having a god believe in you.
Neve closed her fingers around the bone. She lifted her hand from the Leviathan’s. The corpse-puppet sat back, waiting. Even the churn of the dying true god at the back of the cavern grew still, that one massive black eye fixed on her.
“How?” she murmured.
“A blade across the throat will suffice.” The puppet’s smile widened. “We are tied together by more than seaweed.”
So Neve lunged across the table and swiped the sharp end of the god-bone across the Leviathan’s neck.
Stillness. It was a profound thing, after spending so long with that ever-present rumble beneath her feet, the slight vibration of a breaking world.
Slowly, the corpse-puppet’s head lolled back, the bloodless gash across its dead neck widening, widening as the weight of its head pulled at the wound, ripping the rubbered flesh. Behind it, the vast shape of the true Leviathan shuddered, that massive eye still fixed on her, lidless and staring.
The weight of the head tore through spongy skin and desiccated sinew, snapped brittle ossified bone. It fell to the ground.
And the cavern shook like the world was ending.
Power was a black rush, wilder than she’d ever seen it before. It rushed from the back of the cavern, where the true Leviathan rattled in death throes, ropes of shadow flowing straight toward Neve like she was the ocean to its river.
She raised her hands.
It slammed into her with the force of a hurricane, the Leviathan’s power tangling in her fingers and slicing into her skin as if it were no barrier at all. It was cold, a chill deeper than she’d thought possible, ice poured over her head in a wave that just kept coming, a vein of darkness running congruent to her every limb, her every thought. Her mouth wrenched out a scream, but she couldn’t hear it above the rush of magic, the power of the strongest Old One making a home in her instead.
When the last of the magic finally drained into her, Neve collapsed. She barked her knees against the shell-pocked floor, her hands sliced on coral shards. Above her, in that window made by a hole in the cavern ceiling, the sea and the wall of pyramid-stacked bones flipped back and forth, sometimes one and sometimes the other. The very stone of the cavern seemed to thin, growing nearly transparent, as the Kings pulled them to the Sanctum, power drawing power.
She curled up on the floor, flooded with dark divinity, and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Neve!”
Solmir, freed with a final shattering—the coral prison sundered in half, and he burst through, hands bloody messes and a snarl on his face, eyes gleaming impossibly blue. Stalactites shook free of the ceiling as he ran across the breaking floor toward her, gaze tracking from the headless puppet to the rapid interplay of rock and bone as the cavern faded away.
A jagged spear of rock broke away from the ceiling right above Neve. She heard the groan but couldn’t make herself move—her limbs felt so heavy, so full of magic and darkness and cold.
Something landed on her first, softer than the stone, though not by much. Solmir stretched over her, wrapped his arms around her middle, and rolled, taking both of them out of the way of the falling stalactite seconds before it hit the ground where Neve had been. They landed with him atop her, hands on her shoulders, shock and fear and awe in his eyes.
“What did you do, Neve?” He asked it quietly. And the look on his face said he already knew the answer.
All her attention remained on him, on the blue of his eyes and the dagger-sharpness of his cheekbones, the line of puckered scars along his forehead. He was her still point as the world changed around them, rock fading away until it was gone, the sea merely a memory.
Power drew power, and they’d been pulled to the most powerful thing left in this dissolving underworld.
“You know what she did, boy.”
It wasn’t the voice she recognized, wasn’t exactly the one she’d heard in the cairn with the Serpent. Deeper, more graveled, as if it came out of the earth instead of a throat. But the cadence was the same, the royal arrogance, the too-friendly tone.
Valchior laughed, low and rolling. “She did exactly what we thought she would.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Raffe
Eammon looked like he hadn’t slept in days. In the shadows of the cloister room, Raffe saw him drop a kiss to Red’s forehead before heading to the door. He closed it softly behind him and ran a hand over his face. “This is the first deep sleep she’s had since she saw Neve. I suppose I should be grateful for that, at least. She’ll rest better on a land-bound bed.”
“There’s one good thing about being stuck here to add to the list,” Raffe said, leaning against the wall across from the room.
“How many things are on the list?”
“So far, one.”