The silence on the drained seabed didn't last.
Devant still stood on the edge of the jagged chasm, his pleasant face wiped clean by the mother of dragons. He had no polite deflection ready and no riddle to hide behind. The pale boy just stared at her, and the dented tin cup hung forgotten in his grip.
Then the bottom of the world began to scream.
The sound came up through my boots first. After months of the Hex humming behind my eyes, it was almost a relief to hear a noise that was only a noise, the grinding shriek of something enormous coming apart. The coral-like spires of bone around us shook so hard that the crushed pumice at my feet blurred into a grey haze.
Tiamat had been the cork in the bleeding wound between the worlds. I had pulled her out. Now the wound was trying to close.
