Page 275 of Blade of the Nightking

I fumbled for the hilt, gritting my teeth as the iron webbing bit into my skin, each touch sending my magic deeper inside me.

"I want you to die knowing this." Thalassis's words rang with terrible finality. "Noctharis will perish because of you. Every male. Every female. Every child.”

My fingers closed around the knife.

"You thought Aedric's little display of temper was cruelty?" He sank his fingers deeper into Rìan's wound, and Rìan's spine arched off the ground. "The Full Circle will show your people what justice truly looks like. They'll scream until their voices fail them. They'll pray for death long before we grant it. What Aedric did to your Court will seem like kindness by the time we're through. Burning a library..." He scoffed. "Taking a handful of tongues..."

Something inside me ruptured. Tongues?

"Those were acts of mercy." He leaned closer still. “The Dusklands will drown in the blood of your people. And it will all begin… with Dannis."

Tongues.

My mind leaped back to the servants. To Nadja. To the empty mouths where their tongues should have been, nothing remaining but wriggling stumps of scar tissue.

I'd asked her what had happened. She'd pointed to her head before making those strange fluttering motions with her fingers.

I'd taken it to mean Rìan. His power to invade minds. The movement of her hands, I thought, had been her way of describing the Veil.

But that wasn't what she'd been trying to tell me at all.

Every gesture rearranged itself now into a new, horrifying truth.

She’d tapped the side of her head. Not to indicate Rìan’s power, but something else entirely. The color of her hair. She was blonde.

And the movement of her fingers… Not magic.

Flames.

She hadn't been trying to describe the Dark Prince.

She'd been trying to tell me it was Aedric.

Something ignited deep in my belly, erupting through me with such violence it felt as though my chest had split wide open, white-hot fury coursing beneath my skin. With every ounce of strength I had left, I wrenched my arm upward. The bone knife sliced through the iron mesh as though it were nothing more than silk, the strands hissing as they parted and slithered from my shoulders. I tore myself free, pushing up from the sand in one fluid movement, oblivious to the guards shouting all around me.

The servants.

Nadja.

My magic ripped forward at once, racing toward the blaze of my wrath with greedy, ravenous hunger, and I opened myself to it completely, surrendering every ounce of that terrible rage.

I felt it latch on. Felt it sink its teeth into the beast inside me and feast, devouring the immensity of my anger and hurt until it burned brighter and brighter beneath my skin, stripping away the last remnants of my humanity as effortlessly as fire racing through dry grass.

Still it hungered. It burrowed deeper, consuming every tangled layer of emotion in turn—fear, grief, horror, mercy—until the tempest within me dissolved into a clear, perfect stillness.

Tentatively, I ran a mental hand down its spine, just as Levinica had done countless times with Titter Mouse curled in her lap.

The Eidra arched into the touch.

The world sharpened. Every heartbeat echoed through the beach like a drum beneath my feet. Every frightened breath of the guards surrounding me, every invisible current of magic weaving through the air, every grain of sand shifting beneath the tide became impossibly clear, each one laid bare before me with crystalline precision.

Across the beach, Thalassis's smile faltered. His eyes followed the silver radiance spreading beneath my skin, racing through my veins and lighting my flesh from within, my entire body a vessel for something far older than the bones that contained it. I watched, unmoved, as the victorious gleam drained from his face, replaced by naked horror.

"No..." The word escaped him as little more than a breath.

His terror smelled sweet in the air.

Rìan's head turned toward me in the sand. He stared up at me, and in his eyes I saw neither fear nor surprise, only a sorrow so profound it reached somewhere beyond my grasp, into the place where my heart had been before the Eidra had fed.