Evlorasin thinks, puffing out rancid clouds into the crisp salt air. It starts scratching at the dirt suddenly, and Malachite, staring at it warily this whole time and very probably fighting his instincts to kill the valkerax, likes none of it.

“What exactly is it doing, Six-Eyes?”

“Ev,” I start, running my hand over one of its talons. “What’s wrong?”

“One cannot destroy a Tree. It will only grow back from the other. I worry your fight will become the dust of nothing.”

I think back to all that time I spent with it in the arena. The story-speech of the valkerax is a lot more coherent now that Evlorasin can resist the call of the Bone Tree with the Weeping I taught it. But it still smacks of chaos and nonsense. Trees growing back from one another?

“Do you mean…” I trail off, thinking desperately. “If we wanted to destroy the Bone Tree, we’d have to destroy the Glass Tree, too?”

I can see myself reflected in Evlorasin’s milky, pupilless eyes, the sixth one on the bottom a vast mess of browned scar tissue. It watches me for a long moment, and then thrashes its tail around.

“Destruction and creation are blood kin held fast in one body—they can never be separated. As the Trees were never meant to be.”

I feel my whole face wrinkling with confusion. I know asking it to clarify is pointless—it’s not what Evlorasin’s saying that’s the problem. What it’s saying is true, and real. It’s the fact I can’t understand it. The concepts, the words. I can’t understand them like it does. Another language. No—another perspective entirely, one that’s been around for far longer than I have. One that knows so much more about how Arathess works at its very bones.

My eyes roam over the valkerax’s pale stretch and catch on something far down its body, by its back leg. An injury. Unlike the shallow scratches of the glass roots nicking its scales, this injury is deep, dark red, and still healing. The scales are all peeled away, rotting, scabbing replacing them. I slide down and touch the edges of the wound tenderly.

“Ev, where did you get this?”

“Blood kin,” Evlorasin grunts, its flank trembling with even the slightest touch I give on its exposed flesh. “My own blood kin turned against me.”

“They bit you?”

“Teeth on flesh. I fled. They followed. They have my blood, now.”

My mind screams soundlessly—something sitting unright in its words, off-center. But whatever it is, it hangs just out of my grasp.

“What’ll you do after this?” I ask. “You could come with us. Always handy to have someone who can fly.”

“Your cause is noble,” Evlorasin agrees. “But I am changed. I listen to the sky. It is what I will live for, and what I will die for.”