Page 149 of Turncloak

That voice inside Saffron kept screaming no.

She tried not to listen, not to hear. Not to believe.

Miret flipped up the silver clasp with a casual thumb, seemingly hardened to the crushing waves of sorrow and despair washing through the air. Somewhere in the first cave, Harrow still moaned and muttered.

The whole world seemed to slow, time treacling and congealing until seconds no longer felt as rigid or boundaried as they used to. Entire lifetimes, entire universes, could fit into a lone minute.

The lid opened slowly, and then all at once, as though shoved from within.

All the air sucked into the center of the room, like an enormous invisible creature had inhaled.

And then—

—a shadow.

A shape, a blur, a smear of pure darkness, soared from the chest.

It swirled through the air like a tornado.

Miret threw himself backward, wrists slamming into the rock, but did not cry out. None of them did. Sound had ceased to function normally, at once deathly loud and unearthly silent.

The shadow plunged into the set of bones.

And the bones leapt to life.

Monstrous, ungodly life.

They blackened to soot, assembling themselves in the approximate shape of a wolf standing on hind legs. The skull filled with dark smoke, eyes glowing white in cavernous sockets.

Saffron thought her bladder might empty, thought her body might simply cease to stand from the sheer depth of her terror.

All at once, she knew—without truly knowing—what she was looking at.

“I always thought it might have something to do with the Sordai.”

“The ancient foe Parlin defeated?”

“Parlin lived a thousand years ago, did he not?”

Saffron had been so dismissive. But the bones of her, the soul of her, knew exactly what she was looking at. As though her ancient ancestors had passed down the knowledge of it, an inherited understanding, borne of world-ending fear.

That’s who the internal screams belonged to. The innate terror, the inherent dread.

It was theirs. The mages from a thousand years back in her bloodline.

These thoughts and realizations occurred between one second and the next, and in that time, the Sordai hovered suspended over the rocky platform, eyeless but with eyes, soundless but somehow roaring, and then it swooped down, down—

—straight at Miret.

Miret tried to roll away, to scramble back, but he wasn’t fast enough.

The Sordai dove into him, through him, and out the other side.

Taking with it…something.

A light, a glow. Something essential and life-giving.

It moved through Miret, and it drank.