The last piece of Zhiliary had become (a fist-sized knot of black heartmeat wrapped in twitching tentacles) rolled across the cracked marble and burrowed into a steaming pile of its own entrails. Sous watched it vanish, breath ragged, claws scraping stone as she forced herself upright.
Blood poured from the ruin of her shoulder, from the split toad mouth, from every seam where skin had torn away from bone. The blue seal on her neck flickered, dying. She pressed her remaining functional claw against it anyway, forcing the last sparks to flare.
The pile convulsed.
Flesh surged upward like a geyser of meat. Ribs erupted from nothing, knitting into a cage taller than the palace gates. A spine assembled itself with wet cracks, vertebrae slotting together like cartridges in a magazine.
Arms unfolded from the shoulders, four of them this time, each ending in a cluster of scythe claws that dripped molten rot. The torso split open again, wider, revealing a vertical mouth lined with human teeth stolen from every corpse Zhiliary had ever devoured. From that maw rose a new head: no longer wolf, no longer anything once alive. Just a bulbous tumor of eyes and fangs and pulsing seals that bled light.
Sous spat a mouthful of blood and lunged.
She met the newborn horror before it finished standing. Her tongue lashed out, barbs sinking into the eye-cluster. She yanked hard; half the eyes tore free in wet ropes and slapped against the stone.
Zhiliary answered with a sound that was every scream ever screamed at once. One scythe arm whipped sideways and carved Sous from hip to collarbone. Flesh peeled away in a single sheet. Bone gleamed white for an instant before blood flooded the wound.
Sous twisted mid-air, claws raking across the vertical chest-mouth. Teeth shattered; black saliva sprayed like tar. She landed inside the rib cage, boots sinking ankle-deep in pulsing organs. The walls closed around her, trying to crush. She jammed both arms outward, claws locking ribs apart, and began climbing the inside of the monster like a chimney of meat.
Every handhold tore free chunks of lung and heart that rained down steaming.
Zhiliary's four arms reached in after her, claws scraping bone, trying to pluck her out. Sous's tongue coiled around one wrist, yanked, and the entire arm tore off at the shoulder in a geyser of black fluid. She used the severed limb like a club, smashing ribs aside until she burst out the top of the skull in an explosion of brains and skull shards.
She landed on the terrace twenty feet away, rolled, came up running. Zhiliary turned, the missing arm already budding new growth, flesh writhing like maggots. Sous leapt again, claws first, straight into the vertical mouth. Teeth clamped around her torso, piercing lungs, grinding ribs. She forced her arms outward, claws punching through the back of the throat. She pulled. The entire head split down the middle with a sound like wet canvas ripping.
Black blood jetted fifty feet into the air.
Zhiliary staggered, headless again, but the body kept coming. Tentacles erupted from the neck stump, thicker than tree trunks tipped with snapping jaws. They wrapped Sous, dragged her close, slammed her against stone again and again until the terrace cracked into a crater. Each impact drove broken ribs through her lungs. She tasted iron and fire.
She bit.
Toad jaws stretched impossibly wide, closed around three tentacles at once. Barbed tongue speared through them, hooked, tore. The tentacles came away in her mouth; she spat them out still thrashing and drove her claws into the chest cavity again. This time she seized the core: a black sun of meat and seals beating at the center of everything. She squeezed until her talons met through it.
The explosion hurled both monsters apart.
Sous flew backward, hit the balustrade, crashed through it, and landed in the dead gardens below. Thorns long petrified stabbed through her back and thighs. Zhiliary's torso landed upright thirty paces away, legs gone, crawling forward on four arms and tentacles, now, a writhing carpet of new tentacles that pushed it across the ground like a centipede made of nightmares.
Sous rose. One arm hung useless, claws shattered. Blood sheeted from her ruined face. She walked forward anyway, limping, dragging the broken arm, tongue lolling like a torn flag.
Zhiliary met her in the center of the garden.
They collided without grace now, just exhaustion and hate. Claws tore. Teeth ripped. Tentacles crushed. Sous's remaining claw carved a canyon across Zhiliary's torso; black organs spilled out and kept crawling. Zhiliary's scythe arms opened Sous from sternum to pelvis; intestines unspooled across the dirt like wet rope. Neither slowed.
Sous jammed her claw into the crawling core again, deeper, until her shoulder disappeared inside the wound. She twisted, felt something vital tear. Zhiliary's entire body seized. Seals detonated in white-hot flashes that burned away flesh in layers. Sous held on, riding the convulsions, claw buried to the armpit in the thing that refused to die.
Another explosion.
This one flung Sous clear across the garden. She hit the palace wall hard enough to leave a crater, slid down, leaving a red smear ten feet long. Zhiliary's remains lay scattered in burning chunks, still moving, still trying to reassemble.
Sous could not stand. Lungs shredded, spine cracked, blood no longer pouring, only seeping. She crawled forward on elbows and one claw, leaving a trail through ash and gore. The largest piece of Zhiliary, a torso with one arm and half a head, dragged itself toward her across the ruined earth.
They met again.
Sous reached it first. She wrapped her broken arm around the neck stump, pressed her ruined toad mouth against the place where a heart should have been, and bit down. Fangs punched through seals and meat until they met the core again. She tore it free, swallowed once, twice, choking on black fire.
The core burst inside her chest.
Blue and crimson light detonated outward, vaporizing everything in a fifty-foot circle. When the glare faded, nothing remained except a smoking crater and two bodies lying motionless in the dawn.
Sous's seal finally went dark.
Zhiliary's pieces, for the first time, did not move.
Sous lay on her back, staring at the burning sky, blood bubbling from every hole in her body. Somewhere beyond the ringing in her ears she heard footsteps running, voices shouting her name, hands reaching.
She closed her ruined eyes and let darkness take her before the next heartbeat could start another war inside her flesh.
She awoke moments later, realizing there was no one else there. No one was screaming her name. She leaned forward and saw Zhiliary still alive, slowing stitching herself together.
Sous lent forward on the ground. "Aqua senere," she said, allowing her wounds to slowly heal with the water spell. She slowly got to her feet.