I Only Summon Villainesses

The tide took its first step back into the light, and I lifted hands with nothing left in them, and I got ready to die on my feet, because at least that was a choice.

Then the floor moved.

The whole black shelf of stone under ten thousand crawling bodies tilted a single degree, the way a ship’s deck tilts when something vast rolls over beneath the hull, and every Lost Mouth in the dark went still at once.

They’d stopped reading me. For the first time all night, every last one of them had turned its bent head the same way, toward the deep dark at the far end of the Precipice, and they were afraid.

’...That’s new,’ I thought. ’I don’t love that.’

Death Sense opened on its own. I hadn’t asked it to. Something so large had crossed into its range that it filled me without permission, and the count I’d spent all night refusing to take stopped mattering, because behind the ten thousand lives of the tide there was now one life so heavy it bent all the others around it like a stone dropped into cloth.

I tried to measure it. Death Sense reached for the killing intent rolling off the thing, and then it flinched back into me like a hand off a stove and gave me nothing. Just the animal certainty every cell in my body already had.

Whatever that was, it could end me by noticing.

Then it came.

It came out of the dark the way a mountain would if a mountain took it into its head to move, and the scale of it broke something in me that had held calm together all night.

A serpent. If you can call a thing a serpent when it is the length of a city street laid end to end, a black obelisk toppled onto its side and given the will to writhe, its scales fitted together in a net of dull gold that caught my guttering firelight and threw none of it back.

Ash drifted off its hide in slow purple flakes, like petals, like something that had been beautiful a very long time ago and had rotted into this instead.

And the head. Three eyes in that grotesque wedge of a skull, set in a triangle, each one a red spiral turning slowly inward, each the size of a cartwheel, each fixed on nothing and everything at once.

’Ah, damn,’ I breathed. And for once I didn’t have a joke to hang off the end of it.

The great head dipped, unhurried, into the thickest part of the tide, and the maw opened, and the Lost Mouths did not run. They couldn’t.

Whatever that first eye did held them where they crawled, a hundred of them frozen mid-slide with their stolen voices dead in their throats, and the maw came down over the lot of them and simply closed.

A hundred of the things I had burned and chained and bled half the night to clear, gone into that throat between one breath and the next, and then a hundred more, the whole crawling flood I could not dent being unmade in great scooping bites while the ash kept falling off its back like snow.

A cold understanding settled into me as I watched this grotesque thing play out, a cold understanding that the only reason I was still breathing was that I wasn’t worth a bite yet.

So I ran.

The grace of Ethereal Grace took the weight out of my ruined legs, and Feather Step took the distance, and thank whatever was left to thank, neither of them cost much, because I had nothing left to pay.

I went into the forest of stone pillars low and fast, and I did not look back, because looking back was for men who had a choice about the direction of their death.

The second eye found me anyway.

I felt it land on my spine like a spotlight made of cold, and the pillar three strides ahead of me came apart.

One instant a column of stone taller than a house, the next a hanging cloud of grit that had forgotten how to be solid, and I went through where it had stood with the dust closing over my face. That was the second eye. It looked at a thing and the thing stopped being.

’Don’t be there,’ I told myself, and Feather Step put me two body-lengths left of the line of that gaze before it could decide I was worth the same courtesy as the pillar.

The head swung after me. Slow, always slow, and that was the horror of it, because slow was all it needed.

Each sweep of that skull crossed ground it would have taken me twenty strides to cover, and the ash-wind off its scales came ahead of it in a wall that stank of old temples and older death.

Then it exhaled, and the third eye did its work.

The breath came out of it not as fire, not as force, but as a long grinding note too low to hear, a pressure that went straight past my ears and into the meat of me, and where it touched the pillars they aged.

Stone that had stood in this dark since before men had names went soft and grey and crumbled in the space of that one breath, whole columns sighing into powder, a hundred years of ruin spent in a heartbeat.

It caught the edge of my trailing hand.

Just the edge. Two fingers on my left hand, the ones already broken, and I felt them wither in an instant, the skin going to paper and the paper going to dust, and the pain of it was a small clean thing next to what it told me.

If that breath had caught my chest instead of my fingers, there would not have been a chest to catch.

I made a sound I’m not proud of and I put every scrap of Grace I had into one long desperate line between two of the last standing pillars, out past the reach of that aging wind, into a seam of dark the great head had already swept and turned away from.

Behind me the maw closed on the last of the tide.

The whole flood. Every Lost Mouth in the Precipice, the thousands I had thrown my entire self against and failed to move, eaten down to nothing in less time than it had taken me to kill thirty of them. The dark went quiet in a way it had not been quiet all night, and into that quiet the three red spirals turned, slow, inward, and began, at last, to look for the one warm thing that was left.

Me.

’...Right,’ I whispered, pressed flat to cold stone with two fingers gone to ash and a well scraped down past empty.

The great head lifted, and turned my way, and started to move.

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