Silver Moraine i put millions of miles under my heels

He watches her too, and feels her hellion stare pick him bone from bone, biting through fur and flesh to bear into his very skin. He has never been more aware of his weakness - how his eyes sink within the shadows of his skull, or how his ribs protrude with every breath he draws. He is tired and hungry, and at best he can run - but how far before she catches him? He holds himself steady, knowing his breaths are numbered if he dares breach the dark one's temper - and he finds himself silently pleading that somehow, some way, the One might show mercy and deliver him now.

He still prepares for her teeth to cut him - but what she delivers renders him mute. The whiteness of the world steals his mind, and he blinks, eyes wide, as every thought seems to fire at once - "she killed your - "

- this is a trick, a ploy. Hasn't Caiaphas proven herself enough? She is a servant of the deceiver, a child of darkness, borne to lie from the father of lies. He doesn't believe her, he can't. He remembers Larus -

- and he remembers Adlartok. The wounds, the blood, the hatred in Tuwawi's eyes and the vicious flash of her teeth against him, the curl of her voice as she dripped vengeance against Caiaphas, and the wolves of the sea. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: Tuwawi had sworn to exact her revenge, and she had done exactly that, and his blood runs cold as a chill whispers through his tongue.

"Shit."

His voice is quiet; the realization sinks against him like a rock abandoned to gravity, and the final light in what remains of his construct of Tuwawi flickers out and is gone.

She was no better than Caiaphas.

"No." he is numb, his mouth is dry. "I don't. I haven't. Not for a very long time." And it feels like he is outside of himself, watching himself speak from another dimension - like they have both become an apparition, and soon he'll wake up and see that this isn't real at all. "I wanted to stop the war." His tongue stings with the fraying ends of years upon years of pent up frustration, and grief. "We only wanted Larus back. I never wanted this to happen."