Enet screamed as her son’s blood splashed her kilt, as agony sank its fangs deep into her heart.

Her breath shuddered out as rage, lust, hate, and sheer fucking joy boiled along her nerve endings, as the song flexed and her son’s father plunged the knife back into the little body she’d strained to birth, into the soft undulating belly this time. She screamed again, but still it grew, the power, the need, and the release, towering above them all like a mountain and crushing Enet’s grief into nothing, compacting it down small and hard until it was diamond.

The song roared upwards as it had done with Betsu, and the Singer stabbed again and again, grunts of ecstasy throbbing from his mouth as red, red, red blood poured over his hands, hot and sticky. So much blood in such a small body and every drop of it was wrung from Enet’s own heart; every drop was a knife that flayed her until she was raw.

Coward that she was, she let go of the diamond of her grief and threw herself headlong into the song until it engulfed her, swallowing any emotion other than those the Singer projected, hiding from the pain behind his lust. She reached out and dipped her palm into the crimson, this last vital remnant of her child. She smeared it across her face and then across the Singer’s, marking them both in their son’s death and life. Hoarse wails tore from her throat.

Xac reared back in surprise, blinking at the stickiness on his eyelashes, and then he roared his satisfaction and stabbed the stone knife in again and again until the boy was meat and the song careened out of control all across the Empire.

The Singer lusted, the song lusted, and Enet could do nothing more than exist within that lust. Inside her, the diamond burnt – as it would forever. Her diamond child.

‘The song needs this,’ the Singer said when he finally cast the knife to one side and reached bloody hands for her, pulling her onto him. Sickened at his need and her own, Enet took him into her with a sodden, hateful cry of black satisfaction.

‘The song needs blood and war. I know this; I know the song. I know what it needs: I and no other. And if the council and the Chorus don’t fucking like it, they can join the boy in death, to my glory.’ He squeezed the stump of Enet’s missing finger, making her scream until fresh tears streaked the gory mask of her face.

‘I. Am. The. Song.’

THE SINGER

The source, Singing City, Pechacan, Empire of Songs

I am the song and the song is me. The song is bloody and needful and will be fed.

This is my will, and cannot be opposed.