Higher up the slope, Devant watched me and turned his dented tin cup slowly in his fingers.
The swarm of eyeless sea-dragons flowed around me like a fast river around a stone. Their bone-white jaws snapped at everything on that beach except me.
They swerved off my boots and veered away from the hem of my dark mantle, and the pitch-black water-flesh kept parting in a clean circle around the spot where I sat.
Cold brine sprayed off their flanks as they passed, and the smell of them, salt and rot and wet iron, filled my nose until I could taste it. The dark rust coming off my soul had marked me as kin, and kin didn't get eaten.
But they didn't ignore the rest of the board.
The teardown was brutal and immediate.
Light went down first. He snapped his wrist and tried to guide the silver edge of Gregory into a seam, but the weight of the swarm drowned out his precision. Three beasts hit his dead left side at once.
