I stared at the soft, chubby woman sitting in the wet pumice where an ancient, world-ending Primordial god used to be.
'That was the mountain.'
A faint thrum ran up Wren's hilt in my right hand.
It's quiet.
Wren was right. For the first time since the Throat, nothing was sliding my thoughts sideways.
The woman was completely naked, her pale skin smeared with grey ash and the black mud of the ruined seabed. She had settled into my lap like she'd been doing it for centuries, and her big breasts pressed heavily against my chest while her wide hips sank into the crushed basalt with a weight I could feel in my knees. Her face was thick and feral and a little clumsy, heavy in the jaw, without a shred of aristocratic grace.
Then you got to the eyes. They were huge and red, and the obsession burning in them was total.
She gripped the lapels of my dark mantle with two soft, clumsy hands and pulled until the collar bit into my throat.
