But that will not curb their hunger.
Dimly, they realized that an orchestra had materialized, cellos and violins playing themselves. A waltz played at an impossible speed. The pink lights burned brighter, and a headache split across Tav’s skull.
“I’ll lead, Messenger,” said the Witch Lord. Their voice was a net scouring the ocean floor. It sounded so much like Kite’s — a soprano and mezzo intertwining to create a hypnotic harmony. Her hand on Tav’s waist left the tingling itchiness and pain of jellyfish stings. She leaned closer, her lips to Tav’s ear. “You should not have trusted the Warlord. I don’t think you will enjoy this.”
The dance began.
Fifty-Eight
THE HEART
The Heart looked around the ancient cavern, feelings she was unaccustomed to stretching through every synapse in her cramped body.
Fear. Confusion. Panic.
Witches drifted through the space, glowing with life-force. Giant pillars of black marble rose out of the tiled floor like oceanside cliffs.
To the Heart, the witches were like dandelion seeds cast about by the wind. No more important than a pebble, no less important than an ocean. She turned away from the revelry to the living, breathing, feeling, hurting, hating structure itself.
The building that had once been the Heart’s reluctant prison.
The Heart looked up into the vaulted ceiling. Cracks snaked through the stone. Ruin was everywhere. No amount of gold leaf paint could hide it. She drifted away from the chessboard adorned with pieces of lacquer and gold. She needed to face the place where she had been imprisoned for so many revolutions through the galaxy. The darkness that had kept her bound and had isolated her, had choked off her freedom. The place where her power had been drunk like thin, sugary sap.
She walked through walls, shells, the carcasses of animals of all kinds.
The roots caught fire. Her tree-daughter was screaming, the pain arching up and down the bark of her spine. The Heart was helpless, unable to rescue her.
The pain would teach her to behave, to stop reaching out with wishes and seed and shadows. To stop trying to touch every part of the planet.
Mouths on her limbs, sucking, draining the pure, raw honey of lifeblood from her trunk. Draining the world.
The memories surged like a shot of adrenalin, the stinging bite of a needle in skin and the aching hurt of trauma that was never past, and always now.
Now. Now. Now.
Gasping for breath, fumbling with the alien shape of bronchioles and trachea, the Heart flowed through this strange, dark space that smelled of hatred and apathy and something else … something familiar …
Sea salt. The island. Hands stroking her hair. The golden leaves from ancient sycamores raining over her body leaving patterns like gold leaf pressed into her skin.
Eli turned and saw crystals of salt on the cavern walls, like fingerprints left by a wayward Heir who dared to love a made-thing.
The panic stopped, and in its absence was a void that quickly filled with numbness. The exhaustion of a soul in pain blotting all out all other colours, feelings, thoughts.
“We’re okay,” said Eli. “We’re okay.”
“No,” said the Heart. “We’re not.”
Eli flickered into existence for a moment, scraping her hand against the sharp edge of a shell trapped in dirt. She stared at the trickle of blood and thought how strange it was that after all this time, after all the magic that had gone into her making, she could still bleed.
“We’re not okay,” she said again, closing her bloody hand into a fist. The truth settled onto her body like starlight over the fields of the moon civilization that had once shone across an entire world. When she opened her palm again, the scratch had been closed by a seam of quartz that glittered under the dim glow of phosphorescent moss.
Not all wounds are empty; some grow gardens.
THE HEIR
The Coven was falling apart. Dead leaves littered the ground; vines were withered and moulding on the wall. Kite reached up and touched a white starflower. The petals burst from the stamen in that final exhale of death and crumbled to fine powder as they fell. She raised her stained fingers to her nose and breathed in. Smell of rot and fear.
Without the Heart, the Coven was dying.
All that knowledge, all those handprints and memories and passions, ground under her feet. Lost forever.
She licked her thumb, grimacing a little at the acidic taste of an empty home. It wasn’t too late. There was still time to save it.
Kite closed her eyes and pressed her body against the wall. Behind her, the army waited.
Water began to leak from the stone; just a trickle at first, but then a steady stream, flooding the hallway. Higher and higher it rose; tiny crustaceans and little electric blue fish swam eagerly in this strange new world.
Leading the rush of water and foam, the froth of algae and dead skin and water skimmers, Kite made her way toward the ballroom, ready to face her wicked, twisted destiny.
THE HEART
The stale air of the caverns tasted of melancholy, as if the Coven itself was in mourning.
Someone was going to die, and the Coven knew it.
And not just anyone — so many lives had been sacrificed to the Witch Lord’s greed, her thirst for control, her need for power.
The one marked for death was someone the Coven loved.
Eli stumbled forward, trying to keep herself together, trying to stay invisible, just a breath passing through a lung. Shadow and light.
Water lapped against her feet. Not bile excreted from an old stalactite; not the tears of a crystal.
Water.
And there were waves. There was movement. The water was moving as if guided by a little moon.
Eli only knew one person who could call the tides, who could coax tears from sand and dirt. Only one person who walked through
