Chapter 157: Transformation

He did not care.

I felt it through the thread. Eva’s blade had gone through his throat, my power had been pouring into his soul for what felt like an age, and the great black mountain of him had not so much as shifted.

He was... unimaginable.

There was no other word for it. We were four small lights, and he was standing in the dark like a man waiting for a few insects to get tired.

Then he spoke.

"You idiots. Who do you think you attacked?"

I could not hear it. I had no ears. But the words arrived inside me anyway, pressed into my spirit like a seal into wax, and they were the first words I had ever heard from him.

His voice was like a falcon’s wrath, high and sharp and merciless, with a scream folded inside every syllable.

It shook us to our cores.

Beside me, Eva’s violet soul flinched. Across the room, Khan’s furnace flickered and dipped. I felt my own thread tremble, and for half a breath my hold on his soul went loose.

But we had absolutely no time.

Petra moved.

I could not see it, but I felt her go. Her silver thread tore across the room, and I felt it line up with his, thread against thread, a streak of light aimed at a mountain.

The air cracked behind her.

Meanwhile, I kept working.

That was the one good thing. For all the pulses I had sent into him, one thing had finally changed.

I had formed a small control over the soul of Scharlott. It was minimal, no more than a finger resting on a door, but it was there.

I could feel the edge of him now, the slow vast turning of his spirit, and I could press on it.

’A little more,’ I thought. Just a little more, and then...

Petra’s fist landed on his face.

I felt the impact through the floor of my spirit, a blow so hard that the walls hummed. A punch from a woman moving seven hundred and forty kilometers in an hour should have taken the head clean off a Beast.

He did not seem to care in the slightest.

A moment later, I felt the shape of him change.

He turned into mist.

It was purplish black, thick and slow, and it poured out of his body and hung in the air where he had been, drifting like smoke.

My thread ran straight through it, and so did Petra’s fist, which passed through him and found nothing.

She skidded to a stop.

My chains were still holding.

I almost laughed.

The spectral links were wrapped around the place where his legs had been, and they had not let go.

They were not made of anything a mist could slip out of. Whatever he had become, he was still tied to the floor.

’He’s untouchable like that.’

That was the thought, bright and cold.

Eva’s sword had gone through him like water.

Petra’s fist had done nothing.

But the mist had not moved.

It had not attacked. It had only waited, as if this form was a thing you hid inside.

’Have to find a weak spot.’

I pressed harder on his soul, searching, feeling for the edge of something I could grip.

Then the room changed.

I felt it arrive before I understood it.

Out of the mist, something large took shape.

A great shadow unfolded in the dark, wide as a cart, and a pulse of raw power rolled out of it that nearly knocked me down.

It was a bird.

A very large one, with purple wings and yellow eyes burning like two lamps. Its beak was long and curved and sharp as a scythe, and it opened wide, as if it were about to scream.

Scharlott had summoned it.

It did not scream. It began to gather.

Unorthodoxity rolled into the room in a heavy stream, drawn toward the open beak.

It condensed there, thick and swirling, a vast gray cloud pooling in the air in front of the bird’s mouth.

Every second, the cloud grew heavier. I could feel the Realm itself being pulled into it.

We knew what this was. Nobody had to say it. A mist like that, gathered by a thing like that, could only be poison.

And we had only a few seconds.

Petra was already gone.

She crossed the room in a silver blur, and the great bird had time to turn one yellow eye toward her before she reached it.

Her fist hit its side.

I felt the feathers crumple.

A second blow struck its neck, and something broke inside it with a sound I could only imagine.

A third landed on its skull, so hard that the ground trembled.

Two or three punches. Very fast and very strong.

The bird died.

The cloud in front of its beak lost its shape, came apart, and sank to the floor in a sad heap of gray.

Petra dropped beside the dead creature, breathing hard.

I could feel her ring burning. Her silver soul flickered at the edges, and the flicker was getting wider.

She did not have long left.

I did not have time to feel relief.

The mist moved.

It pulled together, slowly, with a terrible patience, shrinking into a single dense knot in the air.

Then it dropped, and Scharlott was standing in the middle of the room again, in his own body, with my chains still wrapped around his legs.

He had returned.

But the room was not the same.

The blood that had dripped across the floor had not dried.

It had been lying everywhere, in splatters and puddles and long crooked trails.

Blood from Eva’s cuts, from his own wounds, from the soldiers who had died near him.

I had not noticed it, because I could not see it. I noticed it now, because it was moving.

It crawled.

Every drop of it slid across the stone, toward him, like iron filings toward a magnet. Thin streams ran together into thicker ones.

They climbed up his legs, up his back, up his arms. There was a lot of it, far too much, and it kept coming.

It gathered around his body, layer upon layer, and it hardened.

I felt his soul change shape.

Wings.

Two of them, enormous, unfolding from his back in long ribbed fans of red, each one wide enough to cover half the corridor.

Horns, curving up and back from his skull, black at the root and glistening at the tip.

His body stretched, thickened, rose. He grew until he stood twelve feet tall, and the chains around his legs went taut and began to groan.

And on his forehead, where there had been nothing, a third eye appeared.

It was closed.

I could not see it. But I felt it the way I would have felt a hand over my own face, a heavy shut lid sitting at the center of his forehead, waiting.