“You took my village,” she said softly. “You skinned my father. You told me that suffering was the only truth.”
It hung from the ceiling of Vhane’s trophy chamber, a nightmare of polished bone and liquid darkness. Eight opal lenses, each the size of a human skull, ringed a central maw of razor-claws. No sound escaped it. No breath. Only a slow, geometric rotation of its eyes, tracking everything.
He was wrong.
The creature answered. Not with sound, but with a psychic whisper that scraped the inside of his skull: