If she wanted to be as powerful as Androsse...maybe what she wanted was to take the words and to somehow combine them in her core? She wanted the complicated and intricate True Names of the Ancestors, and believed she understood True Words well enough to somehow build a new name for herself?

“Mandoran, can you run something by Serralyn?”

“Sure. What?”

Kaylin explained the one possible theory that had begun to cohere from all of the disparate bits and pieces of information she’d been given over the last several days.

Mandoran’s normal Barrani eyes darkened. “She’s cursing up a storm—on the inside—and smacking herself in the face.”

“That means she agrees?”

“That means she agrees. She reminds you that the Wevaran develop their name by eating their siblings; the words that become their True Name exist in disparate pieces; they come together to form a whole only when one of the siblings has devoured literally all of the others. I used to think the Lake of Life was a terrible idea, but the more I find out about other racial birthing customs, the more grateful I feel that we have it.”

“You can say that again. Ask Serralyn one other thing. What do mortals—wordless humans—have to do with all of this? How can they fit in? Why did their bodies not die when they...died?”

“She thinks there’s one possible answer. If we consider Azoria’s attempts to capture the actual words at the core of the Barrani a failure, she nonetheless drained them of life, of life force. Power, but not innate power, not intrinsic power; it did nothing to change her base nature. She thinks that if Azoria could have absorbed the Lake and made out of it a new name for herself, she would have been like unto a god.”

“Which god?”

“What?”

“Well, a god. The Barrani don’t really talk about gods much.”

“She asks you not to be ‘so bloody literal’ at a time like this. But...she thinks that if Azoria somehow managed to damage her own name, and she was adept enough not to die, she might be like the ones we call vampires now. If her name cannot sustain her, it is possible the lives of even mortals can, for a time.”

“But this was a century ago. Or more.”

“She has no other guesses, and she hasn’t studied forbidden magics; she can’t tell you what the value of a human life is worth when it comes to Barrani years.” It was a grim thought. If the children had been murdered a century ago, each of their potential lives could cover that time period—but the bodies hadn’t died; the bodies had been executed.

“Serralyn says: being alive is complicated.”