“Good point.” I flash a wink at Yorl as the scholar tips a bottle into my mouth. The taste is scathing tar and ferment, but it works almost instantly—all the muscles in my body unwind like coiled snakes, and I sink into the black rock throne far more relaxed. Yorl is an ochre blur above me, the muscles in my eyes drooping.

“I’ve gotta say, Ironspeaker, this stuff is way better than what you used to give me.”

“Shut up,” Yorl says, not an ounce of anger in it, only gentleness.

“Not quite yet.” The scholar steps in, holding either side of my face in his hands. “You have your painless time, Heartless. Now tell me; do you hear the song?”

I have no filter anymore, my thoughts spilling out faster than I can make them.

“I hear both songs. Glass and bone. But the bone song only ever in my dreams.”

He blinks. “The Heartless hunger is not the song.”

“It is,” I argue, my head lolling uselessly back as he lets go of me. “I’ve heard them both. They’re the same thing. Different notes, but the same music, deep down. I can feel it.”

“That’s—that’s utter nonsense.”

I laugh, rolling my head to look at him. “I sound a bit like a valkerax, don’t I? But don’t you know? The Old Vetrisians split the Tree of Souls.”

“Of course.” He pulls a shining scalpel out of his pocket, testing my skin. “But it’s been more than a thousand years. By all deductions, the Trees’ connection to each other should’ve completely eroded at this point.”

I go quiet, watching the silver blade split my skin and hot blood ooze out. Yorl holds my wrist softly between his paws, steadying the work. I want him to push the hair off my face again, but he’s Yorl. He has a job to do, and polymathematics to aid. It’s enough for me that he cares enough to be here, that he came to this at all. I’m starting to slip in and out of consciousness, the world blurring on the edges. Better to pass out, I suppose, because I’m not particularly fond of the idea of being here when they take my slice of brain.

to be together, the hunger slithers. to undo what you did, weak things afraid of death.

“They want to be together again,” I mumble. “More than anything. So they sing. They sing to punish us…to—to guilt us. To make it unbearable. To make us undo what we did.”

The darkness claws around me, but softly, folding interlocking talons one by one over the light until there’s only shadow and the hunger left—two hungers, same but different and both ringing clear as winter rain in my head.

together.

TOGETHER.

The feeling of someone’s leathery pads pushing my hair off my sweating face gingerly, and then nothing.