Without a knife, she has no way to fight back. But there are other sources of iron. The chapel—the chapel must contain something, some astronomical measure that has a steel pin at its core. Or the garden, where Voyne’s hammer lies somewhere in the botanical riot. But they have hounded her to the other end of the keep, close to the gates, and she can see no clear path around them. Her muscles burn. Her bones ache. She stumbles as she scrambles up one of the staircases to the walls, then goes down hard as fingers close around her ankle and tug her back.

She is so close. She is so close to the edge of the wall. To the long drop on the other side. To some kind of freedom, if only—if only—

If only it were not the Loving Saint who falls upon her now, his hair shrouding them like a curtain.

She twists to face him, teeth bared, but there are tears in her eyes, helpless tears.

“I told you I would make it good,” he murmurs, prowling up her body. She jerks her knee up into his gut, but her leg passes right through him. He is at her side, then, hauling her up. His hands are in her hair. She screams.

He laughs and throws her down onto her stomach.

She crawls.

“You never give up, do you?” he asks. “I was going to kill you gently, eat you sweetly, but that wouldn’t do you justice. You wretched, vicious little thing.” His boot comes down on her lower spine and she can feel her vertebrae screaming. Creaking.

The pressure disappears. Reappears on her neck. Her leg. Her arm. He is everywhere. She flails, meets nothing but air, and only barely manages to roll onto her back.

He looms above her.

“Scared little girl, always hiding in the dark. Do you think that makes your teeth as sharp as mine?”

He flickers in and out of place, half-real, half-insubstantial. He is a hundred different people, exchanging faces like paper masks. But he sounds the same in each aspect: a pure vibration, rattling around in her skull, ramifying.

It has a source. Like Phosyne touching her brow and making choruses erupt, his existence creates the rise and fall inside of her. She focuses in on it. She can hear the core of him, static, unchanging.

The noise rearranges itself, harmonizes, settles.

Treila stands upright. She fixes her gaze on him and refuses to fall into the ambiguity, the impossibility. She sees.

The flickering stops, leaving behind just a smudge of white on the world in the vague shape of a man. The world is still around them. In his chest is a snarled thicket of a stomach, hungry, aching, desperate. And inside of her is a prism, a flashing diamond: heavy and unmoving, the result of every time she refused to abandon herself, no matter the guise she chose to wear.