I’m so inwardly elated—we’re really, honestly getting somewhere!—that I barely hear the change. From between the silence, Evlorasin’s breathing collapses, and there comes a low growl. It reverberates into the ground, up through my bones, and into my chest. I faintly feel a shift in the still air of the arena—the valkerax isn’t curled around me anymore. It’s low, tensed, and I can hear its claws scraping the ground, rhythmic and impatient.

“Yorl?” I try calling out. “Yorl? What’s going on?”

His voice floats to me, too calm. “The painkilling concoctions are wearing off. It needs much more with the scales removed.”

“Give it some, then, and be quick about it.” My voice cracks dry as I feel hot breath coming closer to my back.

“Just stand up,” Yorl says carefully. “And make your way to the gate.”

I’m not imagining things—I can feel the hot breath burning down my spine now, as if Evlorasin has its mouth right against my back. I won’t die, but the thought of getting digested, alive, through the wyrm’s entire body, has suddenly jumped to number one on Zera Y’shennria’s Comprehensive List of Ways in Which She Prefers Not Dying. Faintly, through my terror, I catch the screeching of the gate as it opens, and as calmly as my shaking legs allow, I get up and walk with ginger steps toward it.

“That’s it,” Yorl encourages me. “You’re almost there.”

“The song,” Evlorasin pants, its voice more distorted than I’ve ever heard it—more agonized than these last few days combined. “The song calls for you.”

Shivers snap-freeze my nerves, my rational thought, and I start sprinting. Evlorasin lunges, its claws scrabbling over dirt, its huge maw snapping up air as it tries for me. I make a dive for what I think is the gate, hitting the ground hard, and almost instantly I feel displaced air as heavy metal slams down just behind the soles of my feet.

“Come back!” The valkerax laughs, and I can hear it pacing behind the gate, mewling kindly one moment and snarling the next. “Come back, little wolf! We are alone in the song! But we can be together! The tree of bone and the tree of glass, together at last!”

My incisors nip my tongue out of pure shock. Bone. Glass. That line—it’s so similar to the one Gavik sang. This is more than coincidence. Something is bashing against something else in my head, trying with all its might to line up and slot into place. It could be the terror or the near-digested experience, but my body goes cold, my eyes roll back in my head. I try desperately to hold on to consciousness, to ask Evlorasin about what it means, but death always has its due.

The world goes black.