“The song only wants to consume!” My shouts are hoarse now. “It wants you to feed it, focus on it, obsess over it! But it’s not you! The real you wants to fly!”

“It hurts,” Evlorasin rasps. “The song is the ocean at full tide and it hurts. It will hurt us infinitely if we are silent!”

Doubt. Fear. Threats. The hunger’s trying to drag even this majestic beast down into the depths with it.

“You can see trees again, and—and the color of sunset, and feel the wind on your face! That’s what you want, isn’t it? More than anything? You told me! You told me that’s what you want!”

The hind leg tenses, the titanic muscles condensing for a leap straight forward, a lunge that will surely puncture through the gate like an arrow through parchment.

“We are…of the silence,” Evlorasin pants, sounding every inch as if it’s struggling with an iron weight on its chest.

“You are in the silence!” I encourage. “You are in control. You are not the song! You are Evlorasin!”

“The song….isn’t us.” A pause, and then a strangled sentence. “Is…going…possible?”

“Yes!” I yell into the darkness. “Going is possible!”

I cling to Evlorasin’s hind leg, praying. Old God, New God, God or no God—help this one. Help us.

Suddenly there’s movement, the hind leg stepping forward as the sound of something huge cutting through the air follows. White light. I can see white light glowing faintly from behind my shoulder. Like I’m a rusted puppet, I turn my head to look.

There, looming inches from my face, are five white eyes fixed on me. Five white eyes, each bigger than my head and each glowing faintly, the veins gray and spidery. And in the dim light they give off, I can see the rivers below each eye. Five rivers of blood, falling and curling around one another as they wind their way down the valkerax’s scaled face.

Evlorasin is Weeping.

“Starving Wolf.” Its voice echoes calmly, none of the snarling hisses I’ve grown used to attached to it. The voice is smooth and even, clear in its bell-like reverberations and almost musical. “I am free.”

Not “we,” like it says always, not “us.” “I.”

Tears grow hot in my eyes, and the rush of relief is so heady, I laugh. It’s Weeping. All the pain, all the dying, all the sadness—it’s over. Evlorasin is Weeping, and that means it’s free. That means my heart is mine again.

“Ev,” I breathe. “You did it.”