THE BANQUET OF THORNS

The black vein pulsed again, spreading like ink dropped into water, crawling from Malakar's temple down toward his jaw. His crimson eyes rolled back for half a second, showing only white laced with threads of that same tar-dark corruption, and the sound that tore out of him was not a king's voice anymore. It was something older, something chained, clawing its way up from underneath.

The hall erupted into chaos.

Lords scrambled back from the table, chairs scraping and toppling against the stone floor. General Vane, still pale from his reprimand, was already backing toward the far archway, his hand hovering near the hilt of his blade as if steel could do anything against whatever was happening to his king. The green torch flames guttered and stretched, throwing long broken shadows that seemed to writhe against the walls on their own.

Seraphina didn't move.

She sat frozen at the far end of the basalt table, her pulse hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears, louder than the panic around her. Every instinct she owned screamed at her to run, to use the confusion and slip out through the nearest servant's door while every eye in the room was fixed on the collapsing king. That was the smart thing. The safe thing.

She stood up instead.

Her legs carried her forward before her mind had finished deciding, weaving between overturned chairs and fleeing courtiers, moving against the current of every body in the hall. She didn't know why. She told herself later it was curiosity, the same instinct that had kept her alive this long, the need to understand a threat before it understood her. But some smaller, quieter part of her recognized the sound Malakar was making. It was pain. Real pain, the kind that didn't care whether the creature making it wore a crown or fangs.

"My Lord." A tall commander near the head of the table reached for Malakar's shoulder, only to be thrown backward by a violent pulse of dark energy that split the air with a sound like tearing cloth. He hit the floor hard and didn't get up right away.

Malakar's knees buckled. He caught himself against the edge of the basalt table, both hands splayed flat on the black stone, his claws digging furrows into it as though the rock were no harder than bread. His breath came in ragged, tearing gasps. The black veins had reached his throat now, pulsing in time with something that wasn't a heartbeat, something faster and hungrier.

"Get back," he snarled, and this time the voice cracked in the middle, half his own and half something clawing through him from beneath. "All of you. Get back."

Nobody obeyed fast enough. Seraphina was already close, close enough to feel the heat rolling off him in waves, wrong heat, feverish and unnatural, close enough to smell the burnt-copper edge beneath his usual scent of smoke and cold iron.

"Your Majesty." She didn't know what she meant to say next. She only knew that stopping felt more dangerous than continuing.

His head snapped toward her, and for one suspended heartbeat she looked into eyes that weren't crimson and weren't silver-gold either. They were black from lash to lash, a depthless black that swallowed the torchlight instead of reflecting it, and something behind that black looked back at her with a hunger that had nothing to do with hunger for food.

"Run," he ground out, every word costing him visibly, his whole massive frame shaking with the effort of holding still. "Seraphina. Now."

It was the first time he had said her name.

She should have run. Every warlord who'd fled toward the archways had the right idea, and some detached, rational corner of her mind catalogued that fact even as her feet stayed rooted to the stone. But she had spent her whole life reading the difference between a threat and a warning, and this, whatever was happening to him, was a warning meant to protect her, not a threat meant to harm her. That distinction mattered more than it should have.

The black vein reached his eye and the black swallowed the last thread of gold.

What came out of him then wasn't a roar. It was lower than that, a resonance that she felt in the bones of her feet before she heard it in her ears, a sound that made the remaining goblets on the table shatter one by one down the length of the hall like a string of small, delicate detonations. The green flames in every torch guttered out at once, plunging the hall into a darkness broken only by threads of pale moonlight bleeding through the high narrow windows.

In that darkness, Malakar's silhouette began to change.

It wasn't smooth, the way a story might promise. It was violent and wrong, the crack of bone reshaping itself too fast for flesh to follow, a sound like a tree splitting in a storm. His shoulders widened impossibly. Black fur, or something like fur, or something like scales trying to remember what fur was, rippled up along his forearms. His hands, braced against the ruined table, elongated, fingers curling into something built for tearing rather than gripping.

Seraphina's breath locked in her chest. Every survival instinct she had screamed the same word over and over, louder than thought.

Move.

She didn't.

"Seraphina." Her name again, barely recognizable now, dragged up through a throat that was reshaping itself around the syllables, each letter costing him blood she could hear catching wetly in the back of it. "I cannot stop this one. Not this time. You have to go, before I—"

He didn't finish.

The last coherent thing she saw of his face, human enough to still be called a face, twisted with something that looked, impossibly, like grief. Then the black consumed the rest of him whole, and where the king of the Under-Realm had stood a moment before, something vast and wrong now crouched atop the wreckage of his own banquet table, breathing in slow, grinding pulls that rattled the shattered glass across the floor.

Its head lifted. Its eyes found her in the dark, twin points of depthless black in a room gone otherwise silent as a held breath.

Every remaining lord and guard had already fled the hall.

She was alone with it.

The thing that had been Malakar rose to its full height, and the shadow it cast stretched long and hungry across the basalt floor, swallowing the space between them one impossible inch at a time. Somewhere behind her, far down the corridor, she heard Lyra's voice screaming her name, desperate and far too distant to help.

The creature took one slow, deliberate step toward her, claws striking sparks from the stone.

And then it smiled, a horrible parody of the smile Malakar wore when he was amused, and spoke in a voice that was not his at all.

"Finally," it rasped. "A taste."