‘She is so much stronger now that her mind is all that is left to her,’ he says. ‘Now that there is no other purpose for her to serve.’

‘You cut her apart just to make her stronger,’ I say. ‘To use her.’

Amenthas nods, and I scream through my teeth, straining against his hold on me. I feel the muscles in my forearms pull and tear with the need to draw my swords. With the need to destroy him, body and mind and soul.

‘You do love her so,’ he says absently. ‘There is no wonder you came apart so readily when she did.’

‘You speak as though you know what it is to feel,’ I snarl. ‘You don’t.’

‘I don’t?’ Amenthas says, fixing me with his crimson eye-lenses. He rings his staff against the stone and my vision is overtaken by his past. By everything he has done. By worlds burning, and gateways that open in the sky. By the nightmares that spill out of them. I see heresy and wickedness. Witchcraft and slaughter. But I see something else, too. Something from a time long past. From a time before our myths were made.

I see Amenthas clad not in archaic armour, but in cloth. Not cobalt, but crimson. He wears no serpent’s mask. Instead, the same design is painted artfully onto his skin with gold pigment. The face beneath it is unscarred, and unassuming. Not human, but not so different, either. He steps into a circle of sand where another of his kin awaits. This one’s face is painted too, with the bright eyes and feathers of a hunting bird. Amenthas and his brother are both wielding short, curved swords not so different from mine. I see them fight. Fast, and graceful. Deadly, even when they are sparring. I see Amenthas win without shedding a single drop of blood, then I see him offer his hand to the warrior he defeated. As he pulls his brother to his feet, both of them are laughing.

‘I know precisely how it is to feel,’ Amenthas says, as the memory disappears like dust on the wind. ‘To be alone, when you are surrounded by others. To be driven by regret and by guilt.’

I shake my head, disgusted. ‘I am nothing like you.’