We came down on the wreck of a demon dreadnought riding the swell, a jagged island of black plating slick with oil and seawater.
I laid her on the deck.
Tenebria didn't fight me. She couldn't.
Without Gluttony, everything she had swallowed over ten thousand years, the stolen strength of dragons and demons and Divines, had nowhere to sit. Her body had dropped back to what it was born as: one Giftless girl's worth of flesh.
And that flesh was carrying an ocean of Miasma it had no way to hold.
It was going through her the way it goes through any Giftless thing, now that nothing was burning it off. The years were coming too. Bones that had been held up by power for millennia were suddenly only bone. Her lungs couldn't pull in enough air. Her heart was working far too hard.
She curled on her side, shaking.
"I'm empty," she whispered. Her voice had nothing left of the Overlord in it. It was thin and scratchy, a child's voice worn out from shouting. "Arthur. I'm empty."
