the sky and soaking him to his skin—skin?—and draining into rivers.
He was aware of the bitter punch of copper; that he had put his blood-soaked fingers into his mouth and tasted the crimson stain on his skin. But why?
Soft feather glances brushed across his face. Razor teeth nipped at his ear and he heard singing. No, no, that was wrong. He didn’t hear it because hearing was a separate experience. It was something he did not have. He felt it, he became it. The song and the music and the whispery reed of a voice was what he was now—he was ever changing, ever shifting, and still blood rained down.
This song was not one he knew. He did not know the tongue, it felt wrong, it felt perfect but in a wrongness that made him shudder.
It was sudden, the shift from incomprehension to enlightenment. The moment when the words he was hearing made sense to him in their perfection and their abhorrence.
It was someone else and this voice was angry, it was frustrated, it was sad. It had lost so much and gained so little and it was tired of fighting and tired of war and—
War?
War and blood and magic staining the land and staining the people. Heresy and—
No.
No, this was all wrong, this was wrong. Something still lucid, still Serefin, was screaming because this was wrong.
The war meant freedom. The war was necessary.
The song changed. The song became an agreement. Correcting itself midnote, apologizing for its mistake because of course of course of course this land would never have peace until one of its blasted kingdoms was eradicated.
That was wrong, too. Serefin—what was left of Serefin, if anything was left of Serefin—scrambled for the word that would describe this song. He had it, but it existed out of his reach, just past the point where Serefin became something not-Serefin.
It wasn’t there, though, and so he felt himself fall, disintegrate, lose the last piece that made him Serefin until there was nothing nothing nothing left.
And there was silence. And from that silence came a different song. Sly and sharp and slow. Needling through the silence for something that had gone missing.
There were prophecies and there were visions of a world where nothing was left. What was the point of a world of nothing? But he needed four things: one that was lost, one that was held in a different song’s grasp, one that had stopped listening to songs years ago, and one who was untouchable because they were too close to being a song themselves.
It made it difficult, especially with this world so focused on ripping itself apart. But a challenge was a riddle was a test.
Even if it meant putting back together what arrogance had torn apart. Even if it meant forcing one unwilling to listen. Even if it meant seeding doubt into a zealot’s heart. Even if it meant bringing madness.
To fix the discordant notes ruining the music, it was willing to sacrifice most things, even those four essential pieces to its plans.
First, though, a stumbling prince.
Serefin saw an ocean of stars. A blackness stretching out into forever around him. It pressed upon him, washed over him, swallowed him alive. Surrounding him, guiding him, though he did not know where he was going. He just knew he had been; he once was. He was nothing—no one—and there was nothing but stars.
And moths.
Millions of dusty wings the color of starlight, dancing through moonbeams, flitting on him, around him. One moth, far larger than the others, soft and gray, landed right over his bad eye.
He took a step forward. His foot left a bloody print in the ash behind him. Blood dripped down his fingers, but he didn’t think he was wounded.
But maybe he was. He existed. He was real.
He was dead.
He found he wasn’t too bothered by that, if slightly irritated that his paranoia had turned into reality.
His hand crept to his face, nudging the moth onto his index finger. It complied, its slight legs barely heavy enough to register as a weight against his skin.
The moth and the stars swirled around him until they were one and the same; moths flying in constellations with points of light on their dusty wings.
Something was burning within him, hot in his veins. Something was changing and he didn’t know what. Something within him—about him—had shifted amongst the stars and the dark and the glittering moths.
He thought, quite clearly, This is not the fate my father intended for me.
Blood and demons and