By holding out a hand over the soil, a Manygreen could probe for a “sweet spot,” a nurturing nook of rich earth among the roots and rocks of the ancient forest where a new life could take hold. She found such a spot on a little ridge overlooking Misky Creek, and she was just tucking the nut into its bed when she felt a murmur on the move. A whisper of news flitted from fern to ivy to ash and when she heard what it was she sank quietly out of sight among the leaves.

Only a moment later Lady Vesper landed downcreek. She drew something out of her pocket and spoke and Poppy could just barely hear her words over the sluice of the creek. “To Issrin Ev,” Vesper said. “Kill Batch Hangnail!” Poppy’s eyes widened. What business, she wondered, had the queen with that scavenger? Then her eyes widened further as a misshapen creature squirmed out of the mirror and unpeeled great membranous bat wings that were wrapped tightly round its body.

“Poor starved Gutsuck,” cooed Vesper to it. “Who knows when you’ll eat again. Best you finish off the feathered faerie too. And the crows, if you can stomach the taste of ashtray.”

Gutsuck hunched and went to work on his face, gobbling at his scars from within. With a horrible sound of gnashing and slurping he gnawed opened a ragged, fang-filled maw and hissed with a spray of blood, “Your wish, mistress,” and launched himself into the sky.

NINETEEN

NINETEEN

Across the forest, the hungry one was restless in his crevice in the rock awaiting the onslaught of night. He didn’t sleep and didn’t dream and never had. If he had dreamed in the Dawn Days, perhaps things would have been different. It was dreams that, like threads, had embroidered the others to this world, while he had roamed and ranged, always restless, bound to nothing.

Such were the humble beginnings of the end of the world: the absence of dreams.

Later, in his prison, in the endless tossing ocean, dreams might have been a companion. Instead, every moment of every millennia had passed waking and dreamless in the company of two entities: his hunger and his vengeance. And, having nothing else to play with, he had nurtured them with singular devotion.

When the seal on his bottle had unexpectedly fallen open it was his hunger that had first burst forth. But those creatures on the boat, they were like water from a wine bottle, an unsettling gulp of nothing. He knew now that they were called humans, a new thing, and they interested him not at all. His hunger and his vengeance had led him like a pair of leashed tigers: sometimes pulling in opposite directions, sometimes prowling for the same doomed prey. In Rome his hunger had led him to the devil-ripe catacombs beneath the city to feed; his vengeance had guided him to the Vritra.