“Yes, you keep saying it, but I’ve yet to understand what you mean.” I squared my shoulders. This specter had to be a manifestation of my own hesitations toward soul bones.

Speckled throughout the darkness were faint, flickering gleams of gold. Bones of the fallen were there in the distant hills, and the strength of the power they once had beckoned to me, a moth to the flame.

A ghostly shape of the palace surrounded me, but it was as though I could see it from all sides, nearly omniscient. With the slightest lean to one side, all at once, lawns, courtyards, and palace towers flowed into view.

Near the queen’s wing was a mist of shadows, darker than the rest.

“I do not want to do this, but I must. It keeps those I love alive and safe. It protects our people.”

The phantom let out a rough laugh like broken glass. “The lies you tell your heart. Melders craft monsters.”

I frowned. “I am no monster. I never wanted to be here, but if it keeps my family alive, I will meld every damn bone the king places at my feet.”

“Hmm.” The shadowed spectral took a step closer. More like a man now. Legs wrapped in darkness, arms, the cowl over his face. “Your soul smells familiar.” With a long draw of breath through a nose I could not see beneath the cowl, the phantom breathed me in. His hellish eyes snapped open. “Why do the gods let you come here to me?”

I followed his steps, twisting the more he prowled. “I don’t know. I’ve been ordered to find more soul bones. Perhaps they are allowing me to search. You can’t argue with the gods, can you?”

The phantom barked a rough, throaty laugh. “The gods left this land to tear itself apart long ago. Look how selfish thrones have corrupted the power of those gods they pretend to worship.” He stopped his prowl. “But never has a melder faced me here. Until you. Why is that, I wonder?”

I faced away from the palace chamber. Instead of ferns and trees in clay pots, thick darkness flowed over crumbling walls of the outer gates, and opened to the eerie shapes of the distant knolls tucked behind the line of trees on the edge of Stonegate.

This place held no barriers. If I desired to look elsewhere, the mirror would adjust, it would shift; the cold would pull back shadows until I found where I wanted to be.

Bones were in the knolls facing Myrda. As Damir said, there was a sense of where old burial mounds might be unearthed.

“My craft pulls me toward bones of the fallen. We must forage them.”

The phantom said nothing, merely followed me with his gaze.