Why were her eyes burning? Neve blinked. The thought of someone calling after the person they loved, doing the impossible for just a chance at seeing them again, made her heart feel too big for her ribs to cage.
“When hours had passed and he was sure dawn had to be close, he saw a flash of light from behind his eyelids. And the musician, sure that he’d finally played through the night, opened his eyes, ready to see his wife.” Solmir paused. “He did. For a moment. She stood before him as hale and whole as she had been before she got sick. But then she vanished, and he saw that it was still night. The sun was still down. The light he’d thought was dawn was the glow of a torch—the villagers had come to check on him.” He shifted against the rock. “The end.”
She swallowed past a throat that suddenly wanted to close. “That was sad.”
“Told you,” Solmir murmured.
His silver ring hung heavy on her thumb, just loose enough for her to twist. “So what’s the moral?”
“Do all stories need morals?”
“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.