Darkness didn't just fall it charges at them, swallowing the throne room in a single, ravenous gulp. Seraphine's scream caught in her throat as the blacknss pressed against her skin, thick as burial shrouds and twice as suffocating. The air turned viscous, carrying the scent of freshly turned earth and the sickly-sweet rot of roses left too long in their vase. each breath tasted like licking a tombstone.The crown's thorns pulsed against her skull in a grotesque imitation of a heartbeat, their rhythm slightly out of sync with her own. With every contraction, fresh rivulets of blood traced heated paths down her temples, dripping onto her collarbones. The warmth of her own blood was the only thing convincing her she hadn't already died.
Something brushed her left arm,a touch so light it might have been cobwebs, if not for the unmistakable press of cold, segmented fingers. Too many knucklesToo much give in the joints as they skittered up to her elbow.
She jerked away instinctively, but the living crown held her fast, its vines tightening like a hangman's noose. The thorns bit deeper in punishment, sending white-hot lances of pain through her skull."Kaelan?" Her whisper barely stirred the oppressive air.Only then, click, click, click
The sound of chattering teeth, but wrong, too sharp, too numerous, like a cave full of bats disturbed from their slumber. Seraphine's stomach turned to lead. She'd heard that sound once before, in the deepest vaults beneath Vaelis Keep, when her father had shown her what happened to traitors fed to the flesh-hungry things their ancestors had buried. A torch flared to life near the throne.
The sudden light stabbed at Seraphine's eyes, revealing the queen pressed against the obsidian seat like a cornered animal. Her usually immaculate braids had come half-undone, and the jewels on her dagger hilt threw fractured light across her face, making her widened pupils dance like trapped insects. This wasn't part of the bargain," the queen hissed, her voice stripped of its usual honeyed menace. Movement at the dais steps. The thing wearing Pip's remains crouched there, its spine bent at angles no human form should accommodate. Its head lolled to one side, the skin stretched so tight over its skull that Seraphine could count every tooth through its parchment cheeks. When it grinned, black ichor dripped from between needle-thin teeth, sizzling where it struck the marble. All bargains have fine print,it whispered, in the queen's own voice, down to the exact cadence she used when sentencing prisoners.Seraphine's crown twitched violently.The vines constricted with sudden, vicious purpose, their thorns sinking deeper still. A foreign presence slithered into her mind,not thoughts, exactly, but sensationsc. The crushing weight of centuries. The metallic taste of old blood. A hunger so vast it could swallow kingdoms whole. Mine,the presence whispered without sound, and Seraphine understood with dawning horror that it wasn't referring to herit was introducing itself Kaelan's hand closed around her wrist. His touch burned, not with heat, but with its utter absence. A cold so profound it seared flesh. When she turned, she found his eyes had transformed,no longer copper-flat, but fully black from edge to edge. Identical to the thing before the throne. His lips moved, shaping a single word run! Then the crown screamed,,,,Not through the air,inside her skull, a soundless shriek that vibrated her teeth and made her vision pulse red at the edges. The vines went taut as bowstrings, their thorns flexing like claws.
And from the darkness behind the not-Pip creature, a dozen more pairs of black eyes opened.