Please, do not read any of the chapters after this. I am working on editing them while handling the beast story.
That fool. That wretched, careless fool.
Paloma did this. Paloma and her idiot obsession with the girl, her blind refusal to see what was standing right in front of her. Rinne. A fragment of Rinne, walking among them in a vessel of flesh and blood, and Paloma had been too busy preening and scheming to notice until it was too late.
And now Paloma is dead.
I feel the moment it happens—a sudden absence in the fabric of existence, a familiar thread snipped clean. No grief follows. There is no room for grief. The corruption that splashed onto me when Hiln expelled that ancient essence from her body is spreading faster than I can contain it, and grief is a luxury for those who are not currently being devoured from within.
I burst through the final fold and into the lower plane with a sound like tearing silk.
