The backs of his knuckles cracked over Neve’s cheekbone. It abraded her skin, rock instead of flesh despite the flickering illusion. She stumbled backward, trailing blood from her four-fingered hand.
“Bitch.” It roared from the monstrous side of his mouth, hissed from the other, full lips and cracked teeth in a harmony of rage. “I was trying to help you, Neverah.”
“You don’t have to pretend anymore.” Even in the depths of this illusion, she could hear shouts and rumbles, the clatter of bone and stone. The hoarse sound of Solmir’s scream.
The illusion stuttered, showing her the Sanctum for half a heartbeat. She saw Solmir, scored with cuts and bruises, her severed finger clutched in his hand. Behind him, two shattered stone monoliths, the remnants of spiked crowns. Jittering shadow coursed up and down his veins, growing his nails into claws and his teeth into fangs. Blue flickered in and out in his eyes, at war with deep, void-like black.
He’d known what to do—used her bone to stab the Kings, to release their souls so he could pull them into his own. The others weren’t as strong as Valchior, weren’t putting up as much of a fight. They’d slipped right into Solmir like a second skin, making his body react the same way it had to the magic, but magnified. Sharp and cruel and hurting.
The illusion fell back into place as Valchior backhanded her again, and though it was weaker this time, it was still enough to almost send her to her knees.
“I’m not pretending,” Valchior sneered, his tongue visible in his skeletal jaw as it curled behind his teeth. He loomed over her, monster and man. “I was trying to give you a way to keep him, Neve. You’ve never been good at keeping the people you care about, but I didn’t expect you to cling so doggedly to a path that would kill them all.”
Her heart was a ragged, too-quick thud in her chest, a speeding counterpoint to the steady beat of the key tangled in her hair. “It’s just him,” she said, because the whole thought was too heavy to speak. It’s just Solmir who would die. He was the only person she cared about that she’d have to sacrifice, and for good this time, with no hope of bloody branches and altered religion to try to bring him back.
The afterimage of Valchior’s shroud strobed in and out over his face. In his illusion, she couldn’t see the black smoke of his soul pouring into the air, but she could see how it slowly ate away at the human guise he presented, leaving less flesh and more rock.
“What do you think will happen when Solmir takes us all in, Neve? You aren’t stupid.”
A blink, the illusion flickering again. Solmir, on hands and knees now before the empty throne that had once been his, veins running black, fingers elongated, too many joints and too-sharp ends. Fangs protruded from his gasping mouth. The blue in his eyes was only a ghost, a breath of fragile color.
“Come on then, boy.” Calryes, the last King, creaking as he leaned over to put his massive spike-crowned head next to his son’s. “Be useful for once.”
Valchior, again, standing before her, Solmir and Calryes gone. “He can’t hold us,” he said. “Not without losing himself entirely. And if you think your sister and her Wolf or you will be enough to stop his power—our power—you’re wrong. We will take hold of the world again. We will bend it into what we want. And we will wipe everyone who stands in the way off the face of our earth.”
The word was another crack of his hand against her face. Her new god-bones creaked but didn’t break—still, Neve gasped, pain making her vision feather.
“If it was you,” Valchior murmured, “we’d have time to make the world into what we wanted. Gently, easily, in a way that everyone would accept, because they don’t want to look up from their tiny little lives to see how things warp.” His head tilted, a razor smile traveling from the side of his face that was man to the side that was monster. “It would have been far more elegant. But destruction, devastation—that works, too.”
The feeling of stone wrenching away from her, the god’s heavy hand finally falling from her brow and taking the half-made illusion with it. Neve collapsed onto the floor, curling in on herself as Valchior’s statue fell from its throne.
Not broken, not yet. The seep of smoke from his eye socket was still slow. Like he was waiting for something.
A rumble shook the ground, enough to rattle her teeth. Bone dust clouded the air, tiny slivers of ivory shaking free of the walls to glitter on the ground. High above, the skull of the Dragon quaked, the massive jawbone near to coming loose.