“Immortal hate, immortal anger. Life squirming in a world of undeath. Below the sun and above the moons, together at last.” The valkerax’s voice is a bare whisper. “The mother calls to the son; two long to become one. A daughter like a weapon. A rose between them. A wolf to end the world. A WOLF. TO END. THE WORLD!”

Its voice is suddenly so earsplittingly loud, booming around the arena and dislodging pebbles from the ceiling. Dirt rains down, and I duck beneath its thrashing tail just as the serum overtakes me, cold death waiting with open arms.

Yorl looks tired for the very first time when I wake up again, his whiskers drooping even as he scribbles on his parchment, his mouth a thoughtful line.

“It’s not reacting to the painkillers the same way the last one did,” he mutters. “Unusually willful.”

“I could try to dance for it,” I quip. “I’ve been told that takes all the fight out of people.”

I smirk, thinking of Y’shennria and how exasperated she was when she taught me to dance. Yorl doesn’t bite. He’s quiet the whole time we walk up the stairs, and even when we part at the top, his emerald eyes are deep in racing thought.

“You’re not going to do that whole body part thing—” I start.

“I will do what is necessary.” He interrupts me coldly without looking up. “Better the valkerax be in pain than die and give us nothing.”

“Is it…really that bad?” I swallow, my throat dry.

“You’ve seen how weak it’s getting,” Yorl says, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “The Bone Tree’s command is eating away at it like the basest acid. It will not survive aboveground much longer.”

I watch him go back down the dark stairs with a twisting in my stomach.

“The tree of bone will always call to the chime strong enough to become its roots.”

That one sentence, among all the gibberish, haunts the space between my ears. I know the tree of bone. Varia’s after it. A chime—the valkerax uses that word for witches. Based on what the valkerax said, can the Bone Tree call to a witch? How? And why would it? It’s an Old Vetrisian magical relic, for the gods’ sakes, not a person with sentient thought.

Would it—could it—try to use a witch for its own purposes?

I shake my hair free of dust. No, it’d be foolish to take anything the valkerax says in those throes of pain seriously. It’s under so much stress and agony. If anything of what it says while suffering from the Bone Tree’s command were true, then Varia wouldn’t need me to teach it to Weep in the first place. Gibberish. That’s all it is.