I take a single step forward, Father’s blade at the ready. Behind me I hear Malachite unsheathe his, too, and the metallic ring of Fione’s crossbow unfurling echoes.

Lucien’s eyes widen at my side, and he sucks in a breath as he stares down the tunnel. “It’s alive.”

“What is? Is it a valkerax?” Fione whispers, loading a bolt.

“No.” Malachite narrows his eyes, and I see his pale hand shaking around the hilt. “Something worse.”

Worse? I grit my teeth and step forward, the clicking finally loud enough to reach my ears. It’s getting closer. And faster. Not a valkerax—not in the slightest. Something far quicker, and with far more legs.

“The stone down here might be hungry, but the darkness is well-fed,” Lucien mutters, sweat beading on his temple. He strains, fingers turning dark as his witchfire struggles to spread its sphere of light outward. I step forward without thinking, my boot crunching something—bone. A skeleton hand; human or beneather or celeon, I can’t tell. Gnaw marks deep in the bone. Bones as far as the witchfire can illuminate—thousands. Ribs, feet, legs, half-mangled skulls.

The whole of the tunnel floor is made of mortal bones.

Fione suddenly releases a shot, the bolt whistling past my ear, and I expect it to clatter down into the empty darkness, the bones, but there’s a wet crunch and fear eats me alive. Close. So close. No cry of pain, no sound other than the clicking getting faster, angrier. Somewhere in my brain, just before the chaos, a clear and rather helpful thought rings out.

How is it moving through the bones without making them clatter?

Two impossibly long spears jut at me out of the darkness, and I move to intercept them with my immortal body, but they don’t pierce. They give softly around me, slithering past me like tentacles, or whiskers. No—antennae. Fione cries out, recoiling, and I hear Malachite swallow the most uncharacteristic whimper as one curls up his face. He’s stared down full-grown valkerax effortlessly, but this thing has him frozen in fear.

“It comes!” Lucien bellows.

The rest of it bursts into the light, smooth and long and brown and glinting like polished armor, every part of it, every part of it segmented, millions of legs clicking against the stone of the ceiling and clinging to it effortlessly. Its head, nearly as big as the tunnel, glints with a set of massive serrated mandibles the width of two of me. The head waves madly back and forth, a bolt stuck in its plate-size eye bleeding blue.

It’s not a valkerax at all.

“A migtratus!” Yorl snarls. “The mandibles are deadly venomous!”