The power she’d taken from the Leviathan twisted and writhed through her veins, shadow like tentacles. More than anything she’d felt before, more than the power she’d used to open the way to the Heart Tree. It was right at the edge of overwhelming, balanced on the tipping point where she could either hold on to herself—hold on to her soul—or fall into the magic completely.
It had never been like this before. She’d seen Solmir struggle to hang on when shadowed magic threatened to overwhelm him, but she’d never housed enough to feel like she was slipping away, to feel like she had to latch onto herself with clawed fingers. Even when she’d first awoken and fear made her dredge magic up from the Shadowlands themselves, there’d been only pain. Not this… this sense of being lost. Of untethering.
Divinity is a hard thing to hold, Valchior murmured in her head.
“Shut up,” Neve replied, and didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until she felt the dried blood by her lips crack.
Awareness came slow. Her legs, first, tingling pins and needles, her middle, her arms. Neve kept her eyes closed, waiting to feel solid, to feel like her body was a fully knit-together thing. She kept her eyes closed, because she knew what she’d see when she opened them. Bones and Kings.
The Sanctum, where gods were pulled to die.
Neve took a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes.
Her mind could take in her surroundings only in fragments. First, the floor on which she lay—clean gray stone, perfectly circular. Then the walls—crafted from bones, colossal and misshapen, curved as if they’d been coiled into a hollow mountain. Closer, and it was clear the bones came from some kind of tail, starting small and growing larger as they traveled upward, fringed with sharp spikes.
Neve’s head tilted, following the twirl of monstrous bone. There, at the top of the Sanctum, like the bell at the apex of a tower—a huge skull, a snout and empty holes for reptilian eyes, a carriage-sized jaw still lined with teeth. The expression on its dead face, as much as dead gods could have expressions, might’ve been a sneer or a scream.
“The Dragon.” Not Valchior, not Calryes, but another a voice she didn’t recognize. It came out loud instead of in her head, low and graveled, like stones rubbed together. “The first of the Old Ones to fall. Drinking down its power felt like fire and tasted like smoke.”
Slowly, Neve looked away from the skull and faced the Kings in the flesh.
Or the stone, as it were.
At first, she wondered if she was hallucinating. There was no shadow, no handsome men flashing to decay in the blink of an eye, not like seeing the projections of Calryes and Valchior that they’d sent to the Serpent’s cairn. Instead, four huge shapes on four huge thrones, with a fifth standing empty.
The figures on the thrones were as tall as three of Solmir, utterly different from the illusions their shadows spun. All of them were swathed from head to toe in white gauze, covering limbs and faces. Each wore a spiked crown that pushed through the fabric in a way that made it seem as though the shards grew directly from the heads beneath. None of them could be differentiated, all wrought in identical rock.
Everything that made them human was gone. All they had left were souls, tied down into the foundations of the Shadowlands, sunk there by the constant calling up of dark power. And to look at them now, as they truly were, Neve could barely imagine them ever having been flesh and blood, could barely imagine Solmir ever being among their number.
Solmir.
She whirled, searching for him—she stood in the center of the circle of Kings, hemmed in on all sides by these statues that looked dead but were terribly, monstrously living. But there was no sign of Solmir, no flash of blue in all this gray.
“Where is he?” The steel in her tone surprised her. Neve’s voice seemed to echo and reverberate almost like the Kings’ did.
“Even here, she asks after your wayward son, Calryes.” Another voice she didn’t recognize, one of the other kings. “He always was able to turn heads, wasn’t he? A useful skill.” A low creak—one of the statues leaned forward, slowly, painfully, the sound of it aching in her ears. “You know what his intentions were, and yet you care for him still? That’s more than a death wish, Shadow Queen. That’s a wish for pain.”
“Leave her be, Malchrosite.” Calryes. His voice seemed to come from behind her, but when Neve whirled again, she couldn’t tell which of the stone monoliths was him. They all looked exactly the same. “Neverah deserves your respect, regardless of the foolish feelings she might harbor toward my disappointing son. She chose to return to us rather than go home, after all. Knowing what would happen.”
“I didn’t know.” Neve didn’t mean to say it aloud. She shook her head. “I didn’t know what would happen.”
“But you knew it would bring you here.” A new voice this time. Old, with a quake in it that spoke of age or madness or maybe both. Byriand, must be, the oldest of the Kings, who’d been an elderly man when they ripped into the Shadowlands trying to steal back power. “You knew it would bring you to us. You and him both.”
“No one answered my question.” Neve turned in the center of the circle of Kings, addressing them all since she wasn’t sure which was which. Her thorn-wreathed hands crooked, magic ready in her palms. She didn’t know what she might do with it—faced with all of them, it was probably next to useless. But she kept the threat of it in her posture, in the snarl on her lips. “Where is Solmir?”
A low, rumbling sound, surrounding her so completely she didn’t know which of the shrouded figures started it. A laugh, all of them together, the sound of a rockslide.
“The traitor is where all traitors go,” Valchior said. “Even here, kingdoms have dungeons.”
Her fists clenched, magic surging down her veins, painting them black and raising spikes. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”
A groan behind her—another monolith, leaning down, the King’s face level with hers. No eyes, but if they were lost in all that rock somewhere, they’d be looking directly at her.
“Neverah,” Valchior murmured. “Isn’t that precisely what you came here to do?” The stone head cocked to the side with a groan, obscenely slow. “Or, at least, what you think you came here to do?”
Dust from the Kings’ movements peppered the air, made a cough claw up Neve’s throat. How long had it been since they’d moved? She imagined centuries of sitting still, swallowing shadow and sinking deep into a rotten world, and suppressed a shudder.
She still held the shard of god-bone in her hand. The corpse of the Leviathan had no blood to stain it, so it gleamed white in the gray of the Sanctum, in the light filtering through the gaps of the massive skull above. All of them could see it, all of them knew she had it. And it didn’t appear to bother them at all.
That, more than anything else, made a numbing terror prickle between her shoulder blades.