The aggression drains out of them, replaced by a docile, drugged stupor.
I stare at the cage, then at my own hand. The ring is dormant again, the stone dull and lifeless against my skin. The connection to The Serpent hasn't been severed, but it has been muffled, as if I am trying to hear my god through a wall of cotton.
I look at Leora.
She is swaying slightly, her face pale, sweat beading on her forehead. The blackness in her eyes recedes, leaving the blue looking washed out and exhausted. She looks as if she has just carried a heavy load up a mountain.
"What did you do?" I whisper. My voice sounds loud in the sudden, unnatural quiet.
"I didn't want them to hurt," she says. Her voice is faint, raspy. "They were afraid."
"You protected them," I accuse her. "You protected vermin fromme."
"I..." She blinks, looking confused, as if waking from a trance. "I just wanted it to stop."
I should be furious. I should be reaching for a weapon to flay the skin from her back for this insolence. She has neutralized my power. She has rendered a Khuzuth noble harmless with nothing but a thought. It is treason. It is heresy.
But I cannot move.
I grip the edge of the desk, my knuckles turning the color of bleached bone, bracing myself against a sudden, violent vertigo.
The world has tilted. The gravity in the room has shifted.
For five hundred years, my mind has been a slaughterhouse. The Serpent is not a passive deity; He is a shriek in the blood. His demands are a constant, grinding static—hurt, break, consume, bleed—a cacophony of vipers hissing against the back of my eyes, day and night, waking and sleeping. Every thought I have ever had has been shouted over the roar of His hunger. I have lived my life in a hurricane, screaming just to hear myself think.
And now…
The silence hits me to the core.
It is not peaceful. It is a vacuum. It sucks the air right from my lungs and leaves me gasping, reeling from the sudden, impossible absence of pressure. My ears ring with the phantom echo of the noise that is no longer there.
I stagger, my knees buckling, and I catch myself heavily against the wood.
I wait for the backlash. I wait for the crushing headache, the bleed-over of Chaos, the anger of the god.
But there is nothing.
I hear only the sound of my own ragged breathing. The softscratch-scratchof the sleeping rodan’s claws against the iron floor of the cage. The rhythmic weeping of the rain against the glass.
Sounds I haven't truly heard in centuries because the god in my head was too loud.
A shudder rips through me, starting at the very base of my neck and rolling down my spine. It feels terrifyingly like pleasure. It feels like the moment a fever breaks, leaving the skin cool and wet. The tension that permanently knots the muscles of my neck unspools so fast it makes me dizzy.
I squeeze my eyes shut, fighting the urge to sob. Not from sorrow, but from the sheer, overwhelming sensory overload ofquiet.
It is a drug. It is the purest, most addictive nectar I have ever tasted.
I open my eyes. The room looks different. The edges of the furniture are sharper. The dust motes dancing in the dim light are distinct, individual specks rather than a chaotic blur.
My thoughts… my thoughts are crystalline.
I look at the scrolls scattered across my desk—the Vhoig trade treaties, the defensive schematics against House Malek that have been a tangled, migraine-inducing knot in my mind for weeks. I have stared at them until my eyes bled, unable to find the path through the noise.
Now, in this impossible silence she has created, the solution does not struggle to be found. It simplyexists.
I see the pattern. I see the leverage. I see the flaw in Malek’s southern supply line as clearly as if it were drawn in red ink.
The realization chills me.
