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Part of his face looked as though it had been pressed to a hot griddle. The scales were warped and uneven, protruding from his face at an odd angle and creating a strange, puckered crater beneath his eye. The left half of his mouth was raw and exposed where his scales could not cover the soft skin of his lips and they had been burned away. He was a gruesome sight, and I wondered if retracting his scales now would pain him?
I scrambled to crawl away from him, putting as much distance as I could between us on the dais. But he had no interest in me. He was staring straight at Tatyanna, the right side of his face warping into a sickening smile.
"Come to me, beautiful," he whispered, filling the sanctuary with his dangerous hiss.
I held my breath. She didn't deserve this. Nobody deserved this. But when I looked her way, she was walking with precisely measured steps and her head held high. It was like she had slipped into a whole new skin in the blink of an eye. The old Tatyanna.
Carefully, she picked up the hem of her tattered dress, climbed the steps to the throne, and took her place at his side.
"No, not like that," he purred happily, snaking his arm around her waist and pulling him into his lap.
She sat frozen, hardly breathing, while the rest of us watched Imrys press a kiss to her cheek. Then, he smiled broadly, showing all his teeth and gums as he spoke.
"Your High Priest is never coming back. The time has come for a new man to take his place and lead Ke'Thal back into Re'Utu's light. I am that man."
Another murmur moved through the crowd, but no one protested, and the last vestiges of hope left me.
