This made him pause. “Intriguing. It’s not as if you can tell me something only we would know because if I know it, my hallucination would know it. But, in the theoretical extension of that approach, if you were to tell me something only you would know, then that would prove to me that I’m not conjuring you up in my mind.”

“So…what will I tell you? My deepest, darkest secret? My earliest memory? My ultimate fear?”

“How about what you had for breakfast this morning?”

“Honey Loops.”

“Well, there you go.”

“So now you believe I’m real?”

“Not in the slightest. I may have just made that up.”

“I found your skull – the one the goblins took. Fletcher used it as an Isthmus Anchor to open the portal and I came through to take you back.”

“My skull?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s possible, right?”

“It’s…very possible actually.”

“Did you think of it? Did you imagine your skull could be used as an Anchor?”

“I didn’t, but then I have been preoccupied by the torture and the lack of good conversation.”

“So if this is something that you hadn’t thought of yet, how could I come up with it if I were just a figment of your imagination?”

“Well,” Skulduggery said slowly, “you could be a figment of my subconscious.”

“I’m not your subconscious. I’m Valkyrie. I’m real. And I’m here to rescue you.”

“If you can get me my limbs back, I’ll believe you.”

“Fine,” Valkyrie said, looking around the cave.

He spoke to her as she searched. “To be honest, I’ve given up hope of ever being rescued, so this entire scenario is kind of redundant. No offence meant. At first, I thought some of the survivors might come for me, but I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that they’re all dead by now.”

“Survivors?” Valkyrie echoed. She picked up a leg, fully intact, and brushed off the dust before handing it to him.

“There were survivors when I arrived,” he told her, fixing the femur to his hip in that convenient, yet obviously painful, way of his. “This was the last world the Faceless Ones reached and they took their time with it. I got to know a couple of people before they were killed and I was captured. It took me a while to learn their language, but from what they told me, this was once a world full of magic. Then, 300 years ago, the Faceless Ones appeared.”

“But the Faceless Ones were expelled from our reality thousands of years ago.” Valkyrie went down the stone steps to the bone she’d glimpsed earlier. This was his other leg, and she scooped up a handful of what appeared to be toes.