Page 100 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Elashor answered with silence.

And so the sequence went—question, shadow, crack. Flesh burst. Bone disintegrated. A hiss scraped past Elashor’s teeth. Mending strangled the flow before the next number.

By the tenth, Elashor sagged between his restraints, breath stuttering. Blood spattered the stone beneath him, pooling around his bound feet. Ten ruined stubs jerked whenever Lykor spoke.

“The army,” Lykor snapped, his ice plating the walls around him. “Where. Is. It.”

Rending loomed above the next row of knuckles. Elashor’s gaze dropped to the shadows.

“It’s marching through a rainforest,” he spat.

Lykor’s claw locked at his side. Jassyn had spoken of such a place after his capture at sea, his account hacked apart by missing memories.

Elashor’s answer bought him nothing. Lykor flicked his shadows through another joint.

Elashor choked on a curse. But he kept talking—faster now, hurling each word ahead of the next strike.

“That’s where we found the earthen dragon,” he hissed. “The troops are marching north.”

Toward the Aetherveil, then. Toward Veyrix.

“How are they organized?” Lykor demanded. “Elven overseers?”

“Half-breeds.” Elashor’s lip curled around the slur. “One for every five hundred humans.”

A thin spine of command. Easy to sever.

“And the shamans?” Lykor pressed. “Have they marched?”

Elashor fell silent, nostrils flaring.

Lykor stopped counting.

Rending forked in numerous bursts. The row of knuckles ruptured together, blood lashing the wall.

Elashor convulsed in the bindings. At last, a scream tore free.

Time unraveled as Lykor drove questions through him.

How many razorwings they had in the sky. What Centarya had been ordered to do next. Whether the king would take the field himself. Which arch elves might rise from their estates, and which would continue to fester in luxury while the world burned.

Where Rimeclaw was. Whether Galaeryn always carried the Heart.

Who had touched Jassyn.

Their names.

Answers bled out from Elashor as snow scoured the chamber around Lykor.

He couldn’t have said when he ripped out the general’s tongue. The last answer that mattered had already been spoken. What followed was just noise, and Lykor had finished listening.

He circled the ruin that had once commanded Alari’s armies beside the king, his boots scraping over frozen stone, blood steaming underfoot.

Elashor’s breathing gurgled, each inhale snagging on ribs Lykor had cracked inward, their splinters sawing him from within.

One of Elashor’s legs ended above the knee, ropes of torn muscle dangling. The other hung twisted backward, jagged bone punched through frost-bitten flesh. Strands of mending knotted through the wreckage, clamping only the largest vessels shut. Enough to keep him conscious.

Elashor had surrendered every useful truth. Every name Lykor needed to hunt.