He thought suddenly of Bonnasaint, whom he had not heard from since the other left on his hunt for Panterra Qu. What had become of him? No word at all, and nothing to suggest whether he had done what he was supposed to do.

He thought of the Drouj, Arik Siq, and found a sudden, perverse satisfaction in the fact that he would return with his people, and they would decimate the valley. What difference if he died now? The end was decided for all of them.

He thought of Isoeld—vain and ambitious and foolish—now Queen of the Elves and thinking herself safe. Perhaps she was, for the moment. Perhaps her stepdaughter would come to a bad end, just as her husband had. Perhaps she would find a way to make that happen. Perhaps she would even find a way to escape the Drouj. But sooner or later, she would find herself on the receiving end of a long knife, dying in the same way her husband had, an expendable pawn in someone else’s schemes.

Then, suddenly, something was happening to him. He could feel himself being turned about so that he was facing away from the demon. He could feel the other pressing against him from behind. The pressure was intense, and then it was excruciating. He was being crushed. He tried to scream, but his vocal cords had been silenced and no sound came from his open mouth. He gasped and panted and drooled as the pressure increased to a point beyond bearable, and all he wanted to do was to make it stop.

“Good-bye, Seraphic,” he heard the demon whisper.

He experienced a strange sense of invasion, as if the other were reaching inside him to make room for himself. His body seemed to widen and stretch to allow for this, his organs pushed aside and his bones broken and shattered. He shrieked silently, but he could only hear the sounds he was making in his head. He begged for it to stop, to be over. He fought to keep himself together, but he was already beginning to disappear. His thoughts scattered and his mind lost focus. Everything began to close down and turn fuzzy. The pain eased slightly, and a strange sense of listlessness replaced it. There was nothing left for him. Nothing.

At some point, he could feel the demon’s thoughts begin to intermingle with his own, as if the demon had gotten inside his head. In a few brief seconds, all of the demon’s dark memories were revealed to him. All the years spent hunting down humans, all the killings and destruction witnessed and perpetrated, all the terrible ravages that had led to the destruction of the old world—they were there in his mind.

He thought he would go insane, but before that happened his brain simply quit working and his world went dark.