“That’s as easy a way to put it as any.” Solmir shrugged, making his hair ripple behind him. He still wore it down, though it had to get in the way. “The lesser beasts are weaker copies of the Old Ones they come from. The Old Ones are their only parent.” He turned then, giving her an arch look and a wicked turn of his mouth. “Even the Old Ones that took lovers didn’t manage to procreate with them.”
Neve grimaced.
The only lesser beast they’d encountered so far was the three-eyed goat and that worm-thing with all the teeth. But Neve thought, unsettlingly, that what she’d been thinking of as worm could just as easily be serpent. “How long until we get there?”
“Patience, Your Majesty.”
Neve could very patiently tear him limb from limb, but she fell silent, following him across the cracked not-desert.
Then, a rumble.
Solmir stopped and barely had time to cast out a hand in her direction before the pitching earth sent them careening into each other. The runnels in the dirt widened, spider-webbed. The quake wasn’t as dire as the one before—no clouds of rogue magic bloomed from the chasms opening like hungry maws—but it still rattled Neve’s teeth in her skull.
On the horizon before them, one of those mountainous smudges began to sink. A cloud of dust bloomed into the gray sky, the sound of its collapse made soft by distance.
The quake was over nearly as soon as it began, leaving her and Solmir canted together on the ground, pressing into each other for balance. The world shuddered once more and then was still.
He pushed up first, steadying before she did. Solmir stretched out a courtly hand.
Neve eyed it warily before lightly placing her fingers in his palm, nails clicking against all his silver rings. Solmir pulled her up, hand dropping as soon as she was safely upright. “Last time I helped you up, you siphoned off a sizable amount of magic.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Neve muttered.
He cracked a sharp smile, then started out across the seemingly endless desert again. “We need to make haste.”
She chewed her lip as she followed, a nervous tic she and Red shared. But where Red would pull her bottom lip between her teeth, almost flirtatious if you didn’t know it was a mark of anxiety, Neve tended to gnaw hers bloody.
They walked on. Before long—minutes, hours, Neve didn’t try to keep it straight anymore—something rose up in front of them, a small interruption against the endless horizon. A hill, maybe, but irregularly shaped, with strange humps and curves she couldn’t quite make out.
It didn’t seem like an entrance to a kingdom or a territory or anything else. Neve assumed they would pass it, a strange aberration in a stranger land, but Solmir curved his path toward the hill.
She frowned. “Is that where we’re going, then?”
Solmir flipped his hand at the oddly shaped hill, the lazy imitation of a welcoming flourish. “Behold, the entrance to the Kingdom of the Serpent.”
Neve’s head canted to the side, trying to make this square with the image of the entrance she’d had in her head—something ornate, Temple-like, to mark the kingdom of a god. “Are all the territory entrances so… ordinary?”
“Depends on your definition.” Solmir shaded his eyes from the pale glow of the sky to look toward the mountain range, then pointed with his chin. “That’s the Oracle’s domain, where we’re going next. Does it seem ordinary to you?”
“Yes,” she bit out, irritated. “They’re just mountains.”
“Look again.”
With a sigh, Neve turned to the jagged line in the distance. This far away, the mountains were barely anything but looming shapes. She narrowed her eyes, squinting to bring them into focus.
The angles were strange. The edges of the mountains were pointed in odd directions, lumped up haphazardly. One bulge in particular looked uncannily familiar…
Her eyes widened. The bulge wasn’t a rock. It was a giant skull.
“Bones,” she murmured. “They’re bones.”
“Dead Old Ones.” Solmir turned away from the graveyard range, eyes glittering. “A nightmarish territory for a nightmarish god.”
“You don’t seem to like the Oracle much.”
“I don’t like anything here much.”
Fair enough, she guessed.
As they drew closer to the entrance, its features became easier to make out—the hill wasn’t made of rock. Skulls, again. Rows of them, melted together as if by a torch, cobbled into lines like bricks. A few of them looked almost human, but most were from creatures Neve didn’t recognize, the bones oddly shaped, the angles all wrong. “It’s all damn bones here.”