The Body walked beside your construct. The sun did not dry the melted ice upon that indistinctly coloured hair. The moist warmth of the jungle around you did not impede her, and exertion brought no flush to those long, thinly muscled arms, nor to the slender, gracile legs, nor to the dead cheeks. She had been with you very often, of late.

You saw all the signs of your undoing. You had few months to live. It could be quite easily counted in weeks now. God had been correct: you had not changed—you were not fixed. You were the last, lone, assailable Lyctor. The others were now distant from you, looking to the Resurrection Beast that came to punish their mortal sins and kill their Kindly Prince.

And yet—there, in the alien slather of forest, among the ferns, and fronds, and greenery arching against a skyline that was a more reticent verdancy paling into navy blue—you could almost believe that you had the capacity to be happy again. You were an unfilled hole, but even a hole might be content in its emptiness.

At that point, though you did not know it, you were a mere kilometre from this insubstantial contentment’s obliteration. A hole might also be filled with worms.

33

INTO THE FOURTH HOUR, you realized you were being followed. A very dim awareness of some large presence pierced the curtain of so much other thalergy, and you were instantly irritable—Mercymorn had failed to gauge the planet’s character. It was plain there were large mammals in this region, and you’d have to come up with some way to carefully plant yourself so you wouldn’t get chewed on while you severed the planet’s soul. Your annoyance turned to suspicion when it became clear that the thalergy signature was following you—it was keeping careful pace about a hundred metres behind you, stalking your path. This was not hard. Your skeletons trod heavily. You were leaving a trail that a blind idiot might’ve followed, in the middle of a dark and moonless night; you went back to being irritated, this time at your own foolishness, and you stopped.

You waited in a clearing for your predator. You caulked a space over that rich red earth with bone, so that you could stand on a little platform of it with the tip of your sword touching that mat and not worry that some annelid was about to squirm over your feet. You checked yourself over to make sure that no airborne foreign body was making inroads on your immune system. You pulled your hood deep over your head, and you waited.

The thalergy made its approach. You realised with a deep and slithering horror that it belonged to a person.