Moses's laughter rolled around the dead cavern and faded, and after it there was nothing left to fill the space at all.
That was what struck Trafalgar first, standing in the wreck of the nest. The quiet. For hours and more the deep had been all grinding hiss and shriek and the crash of his own strikes, a wall of noise he'd stopped hearing because it never let up. Now it was gone, and what took its place was the small steady drip of meltwater running off shattered crystal, and his own breath, and nothing else. The mountain had gone quiet around what he'd done to it.
He let his eyes travel the ruin while his heart came down.
The hollow had become a graveyard of crystal. Slush and a dark drying red spread across the whole basin, littered with the scoured leavings of a brood and the great split blocks of a queen.
She lay where she'd dropped, a mountain tipped onto its side, frost still smoking off her in thin lazy sheets, the inner light dead behind her eyes.
