“Scales?” Yorl offers, voice cool. “We removed a few and dropped them down Dark Below approximate shafts in order to stabilize the valkerax’s mind. The more of its body obeys the command, the saner it becomes.”

“Y-You—” I sputter.

“The war is here, Heartless, earlier than any of us expected. The world moves, and we must move with it,” Yorl insists.

“You sound like the valkerax now,” I mutter uneasily.

“What does the Ironspeaker say, Starving Wolf?” the valkerax asks.

Half disgusted at the valkerax’s wounds, my words come out short. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Those are the true names of you.” The valkerax pulls away from me, its body heat fading into the cold darkness. “You are the Starving Wolf. The warmblood watching us with many eyes is the Ironspeaker. True names hold your power.”

True names—didn’t Malachite say something about those? They were important to the beneathers, right? Varia’s true name was scratched into the pipe walls where she killed Gavik’s valkerax—the Laughing Daughter. That’s her witch name, too. Beneather runes always know true names and fill them in automatically, like magic. Old Vetrisian magic, to be more precise.

True names hold your power.

I simply thought Varia adopted that name as her witchname because she was pleased with how it sounded. But if it’s her true name, something she can’t choose…does that mean every witch uses their true name? Is Nightsinger’s true name Nightsinger?

“So you give these names—” I start.

“We do not give,” the valkerax insists, voice tearing with a growl on the end. “We merely read, but where the chimes can read only their own name when the time comes for them to find their power, we can read all.”

Is it saying witches can figure out their true name? Do you know how a witch becomes? I’d asked Fione that once, unknowing myself.

In the midst of my reeling, the valkerax continues in its jagged voice. “The script is large and endless and there is power in it, and always will we read, for it is our duty.”

“Duty?” I whisper. “To who?”

I wait on hooks, on needles. We breathe together in the darkness, and somewhere between breaths, I die.

Yorl is there at my bedroll’s side when I come back to life, the mosslight gleaming in his dilated eyes as he hands me another vial wordlessly.

“We’re getting somewhere, finally,” I say. His muzzle pulls into a sliver of a grin as he scribbles on his parchment.

“I could tell.”

I down the vial. “You look like a kid whose mother just gave him a whole year’s worth of sweetrounds.”

Yorl’s smile fades as he leads me back to the gate, but when I sense it lifted by the other celeon, I don’t hear Yorl immediately try to walk under it.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.