But this time the suns aren’t setting, and the world isn’t moving. I’m lying on what feels like a cold stone floor in a pitch-black room.
“What in the moons?” I scramble to my feet, even though I can’t see anything in the dark.
“Good, you’ve awakened,” someone says. The voice sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Deep and resonant as a funeral dirge, but raspy, with every syllable enunciated, like smoke curling over shards of glass that cut every word at a precise angle.
I vaguely remember it from earlier…
I suppose we will have to do this the hard way.
I debate whether to speak again. Or to stay as still as possible. I suddenly understand why songbirds cut off and freeze in place when us much bigger humans stand beneath their tree.
“Well, then? This is the part where you start screaming and crying and begging for your life.”
Is it?
My mind reels, trying to figure out what I should say—what I should do. You know, other than standing there paralyzed.
“By Eryx, I forgot your kind cannot see in the dark. Hold on.”
Somewhere directly in front of me comes the sound of flint scraping against… something.
I don’t even want to guess what.
Then the entire space is illuminated by a wrought-iron lamp.
Being held by the most fearsome creature I have ever seen.
Vast black wings spread wide. Glowing red eyes burn from within cracked gray skin. His ears taper to sharp points, and black lips curl into a cruel smile. At the center of his chest, a jagged emblem of blackened iron juts forth. Shaped like a crest, its barbed edges appear fused to his stone-split flesh.
What in all the moons…?
The first sight of the creature behind that smoke-and-glass voice sends a chill lancing up my spine.
I have never—never in my life—known terror like this. To look upon him is to feel, in my very bones, every story, every whispered warning, made flesh.
He regards me with those burning red eyes, his fangs glinting in the lamplight.
Then he says, “Now, you may scream.”
Meeting
VEYRION
I bracefor the high-pitched shriek humans are so fond of emitting when they first see one of us and realize we’re even more terrifying than the stories claimed.
But… she doesn’t scream. She only stares at me with those large, inefficient human eyes that hold no glow, even in the dark.
An unsettled feeling comes over me as I watch her watch me.
My first bride is… not what I was expecting.
I was a young stone of only three turns around the suns the last time my father took an Eryx Oblation to bride. But I remembered her wailing upon the altar, waving her thin arms at the audience and demanding that one of us stop the proceedings.
“I am a princess! You cannot do this to me!” she screeched—right before my father ended her ability to plead. Or breathe.
Her tresses held a yellow hue, and the commemorative tapestries that stretched back centuries almost always depicted frail females with pale skin and long golden hair.
