I—we—look over into the abyssal darkness, the flicker of rainbow light catching the visage of a massive fanged fish half as large as the valkerax. It scatters quickly, knowing danger when it sees it. Or perhaps it doesn’t see at all—the other lifeforms at the bottom of the ocean seem to have milky white eyes, much the same as the valkerax. Darkness doesn’t beget vision, but that doesn’t mean the ocean creatures don’t sense the incoming valkerax horde. A sawshark flees too late, caught up in the carelessly violent jaws of a passing valkerax. Black blood clouds in the black water. The skeleton ruins of old ships flicker past—wood and metal and a pearly material Varia recognizes as Old Vetrisian but I don’t. Massive crabs as big as bears sit on the ships, picking off fish and swinging claws menacingly to no avail—the valkerax slither past and swallow them whole as easily as blinking.

Varia and I both know the valkerax are comfortable, down here. Darkness is their home, depth is their home. The bottom of the ocean is perhaps the only place on Arathess anywhere close in scope and feel to the Dark Below. The water rushes past our face, past our ears, but our hearing is drowned out at all times by the Bone Tree’s hunger.

DESTROY. DESTROY. DESTROY.

anything, my hunger joins in. everything.

Ruination. That’s all it wants, and it screams that into Varia’s mind without ceasing, without a single second of rest. Her own thoughts and feelings are submerged in unrelenting pain and anger and lust for carnage, the same as mine. Louder, maybe, and more insistent. But the same intent.

Except I have the Weeping. I have a witch and organs to temper my hunger.

She has nothing.

She’s alone.

She bears the brunt of everything, alone.

But that was her plan all along. She thinks that, she knows that. To bear the worst of it, so others wouldn’t have to. So the girl she loves wouldn’t have to. So she can change the world for that girl, to make it safe for her.

The girl—what’s her name? Ruin? Destruction? No, she has a real name, and I can feel Varia’s mind start to claw out frantically for it, combing through the Bone Tree’s bloodlust, struggling to hold on to even a scrap of reality, of memory, of self. Her name. Her name, her—

Fione, I think, loud and intentionally and clear.