Antal set to the second arm with less urgency. He carved out choicer pieces of forearm, worked through half a bicep, beforefinally sitting back on his haunches. An ease settled over him that Fi hadn’t seen in…ever. His long, black tongue slicked across his mouth, cleaning every speck of gore. Red energy zapped any lingering flesh from his claws. The rest of him he’d kept immaculate.
“That’s… it?” Fi asked.
“My needs are meager, Fionamara.” Antal spoke in a low, shadowed tone. “Only the means are vile.”
She gestured to the mostly intact body. “But there’s so muchleft.”
“On the Twilit Plane, daeyari commonly eat in packs, one body enough to feed several. In the territories, we live more sparsely. One human is far more than enough.”
Watching him eat was unsettling… just not as much as she’d expected. It wasn’t grotesque. It wasn’t cruel. Not nauseating, the way Fi felt after her nightmares of being dragged onto Verne’s altar, her stomach split open while she screamed.
But it waswasteful. An entire life, for a couple cuts of meat?
“You said daeyari can go up to a month without eating?”
Antal grimaced. “Eating once a month is possible but… unpleasant.”
“What would be more pleasant?”
“Once a week.”
Before Verne took over, Fi had never heard of sacrifices being dragged to Thomaskweld every week. Antal had been moderating himself, but even so—
“Why do you insist on living sacrifices?”
Antal blinked again, slower this time. A warier pinch to his brow. “What do you mean?”
Evasive. He ought to know better. “You can eat dead bodies? Same as live ones?”
His tail twitched. “Fresher is better. Energy deteriorates, butwithin the first hour or two after death, it’s comparable.”
“So whylivingsacrifices? Why not eat corpses? People would be less afraid of you.”
“Daeyari have ruled these territories for millennia. This is the system set in place.”
“Butwhy?”
“You’re clever, Fionamara. You know why.”
She did. She wanted him to say it. But if he wouldn’t—
“Because daeyari want us to be afraid?”
That was why every daeyari-controlled Plane paraded sacrifices to their shrines? Why Fi’s people had no stories of how to fight their immortal masters? Not because daeyari were invincible. The prickly bastards just built the narrative that way.
“Live prey tastes better,” Antal said, brittle. “More exciting, for some. But most important: fear means fewer uprisings. Less bloodshed. A kinder compromise than hunting you outright. That’s how the daeyari see it.”
He stood, signaling the conversation was over.
As if Fi would let him get off that easy.
She stood with him, planting herself in his path like concrete. The truth was crushing. It left her feeling small, like she ought to curl up and hide from everything.
Which meant she needed to fightharder.
“Is that what Verne would say?” Fi challenged.
Antal’s eyes always glowed to some extent. They blazed now, crisper crimson after being fed, scalding beneath his lashes. “She has. Many times.”
