On the day Elynoire died, more crows than anyone had ever seen swarmed the bone church in the center of town. She’d served that lonely hall of the dead and its black-fanged spires since she was a little girl, polished its spiny archways wrought from broken legs and shattered jaws with the tatters of her own dresses, smiling softly as the piles grew year-by-year.

A baby was born an hour after Elynoire’s death in the next village over, in the shadow of an ossuary just like hers—a baby who would spend the next sixteen years totally blind. That baby was me. My parents told everyone it was a birth defect, or when they felt creative, a misspent curse. But Elynoire could see far beyond the bounds of mortal men, so she told me that the crows had snatched me from my mother’s arms and pecked out my eyes the moment I was born. She claimed there were countless more visions where that came from—that she’d forever open the door to mystical wonders I could scarcely even dream of if I helped her come back to life.

I didn’t believe her, until one morning I woke up to a white-hot world of psychedelic color in place of the black that haunted me all my life.

When I told my parents, I was found guilty of witchcraft, then walled off behind three layers of bricks in a room the size of a closet in the Nightmoor Asylum.

*     *     *
Elynoire isn’t like the serving girls that slip half-empty bowls of cold broth beneath the flap in my wall and helplessly beg the other residents to stop screaming. Elynoire is—or was, I suppose—a girl with a vision that not even the Grim Kings could rip from her still-beating heart as their pawn twisted the knife to the bone and sacrificed her on the floor of the Valctyria Ossuary.

I try to tell the serving girls that Elynoire was killed because she knew something wicked, something sick: They’re digging up dragonlord bones out by Stargrave. They have been since the day she died, and they never stopped. Sixteen years is barely enough time to excavate a single vertebrae of a monster large enough to crush entire planets, so thankfully, they haven’t made much progress. But still, the thought alone should make any clean-hearted Syndragorean’s blood run colder than death, wouldn’t you say?

But as you probably already guessed, the serving girls aren’t clean-hearted. They ignore me and go about their business scraping blood from between the tiles and pulling infected teeth from the mouths of children wailing in tongues—and if they’re lucky, only occasionally getting bitten. The biting is our favorite part. Elynoire and I laugh whenever it’s their turn to scream.

Crows are beginning to gather at the dingy, unwashed window at the back of my room, pecking at the bars, cawing even louder than the serving girls and the asylum residents combined in an ear-splitting cacophony of pain.

I hope they never leave.

*     *     *
Elynoire says she’s going to get revenge on the Grim Kings of Stargrave, but first she has to help them dig up the dragonlord bones. I ask her why, but every time she tries to explain, the crows scream so loud I can’t even hear myself think, much less plot the downfall of the indomitable demigods that have ruled all of Zyrgoth since those bones had meat on them.

I don’t believe she can do it. A serving girl from Valctyria Ossuary stands as much of a chance of crushing the blood of Marduk as I do of breaking down the walls of my prison with my bare hands.

Not even an hour passes before a cacophonic explosion resounds through the entire asylum. My block is utterly decimated, and the impenetrable cage that mocked me every waking moment for the past two years is now nothing but a crumpled pile of rubble.

Stupefied, I stand there, not sure if I should laugh or run. The crows decide for me. “GO TO STARGRAVE!” They shriek like burned metal grating on broken teeth. “LEAVE THIS HELL AND NEVER LOOK BACK!”

The asylum serving girls make no attempts to dissuade me as I walk out the front door, breathing in the cool air of midnight for the first time since Elynoire gave me back my sight. They’re too busy running—and after all, they always thought I was a witch.

*     *     *
“They’re putting the Blood Spines back together, you know. Just like Ravenmorg when the world was young.”

“What in Black Eternity?!” I hiss, bolting upright in the dead of night, the branches above me swaying heavy with crows. Even though I’ve never actually heard her speak out loud even once in all my life, I already know who it is.

“GO TO STARGRAVE,” the crows implore, far less politely the second time around. “TELL THE GRIM KINGS ALL YOU KNOW, AND BURN HER NAME FROM YOUR MIND WITH ACID.”

Instead, I stare on in wonder as all the leaves in the clearing begin to drift slowly upward in a chilling betrayal of gravity, as in an hourglass turned upside-down. The crows go scattering towards the moon like a tornado set ablaze in black flame, and I wince and brace for the pain as the branch above me snaps off. But instead of letting it split my skull in two, Elynoire somehow catches it, and lays it to rest at my side as a splintery token of friendship.

“I’ve gotten stronger lately, Tanessa. I’m not just breaking the legs of mice in the gutters anymore.”

“I-I can tell,” I stammer, still not sure if the thought of her voice existing outside of my head left me relieved or terrified. “That’s awesome!”

“Imagine how much stronger I could be if I had a body of my own,” she scratches voraciously against my eardrums as full-sized trees snap like paperclips on all sides. I can’t see her any more than I can see the snowflakes stirring in the midwinter breeze, but I feel her hands around my throat, and her eyes dissect the softest hollows of my own soul, sizing me up. “Everything I’ve learned from my time in-between, intertwined with the rage of flesh and blood: I could finally get my revenge!”

I know what she’s getting at before she even says it. It floods me with a dread that surpasses even that which bloomed when they laid the last brick in the asylum wall.

But who am I to say no, when she gave me back my sight and broke my chains?

*     *     *
Grim King Azgoroth von Marduk, Arch-Nemesis of Silvenmyr and Breaker of Blood-Drenched Mirrors. He’s far shorter than I expected him to be in person, spindly as the black wraith’s cloak that trails behind him as he stalks between the monstrous, half-rotten vertebrae. Just as the townsfolk always whispered, he wears the violet flesh of Alnilam’s curse: Everyone wilts back from him—except for his closest advisors, who, by some intriguing coincidence, are also Alnilam—as he makes his rounds through the sprawling shadows, making sure all his excavator slaves are sweating and breaking their backs in perfect time.

The awe of drinking in that dread lord of all Zyrgoth with my own eyes, the descendant of the Emperor of Chaos himself . . . It should have already brought me to my knees, and it would have, if I wasn’t just a helpless spectator in my own body, an unwanted guest walled off in some forgotten room somewhere between my darkest fears and the whites of my eyes.

And that was just the dissociation. No, my dearest, oldest, only friend: Elynoire isn’t even inside my body yet. But if the hair on the back of my neck standing up is any indication—along with the eerie, desperate rustling of leaves beneath my feet, even though there isn’t even the slightest breeze—she will be soon.

“I’m scared,” I hiss, teeth clenched, nostrils flared. That’s when I realize that every admission of fear is an opening, and every whisper of doubt an invitation. It always has been. I’m a fool.

“Don’t be,” she reassures me, and the ground beneath our feet begins to rumble and shift as I feel my arm raise involuntarily. “I’ve already told you, King Azgoroth will owe us his life if we dig him up a Blood Spine, alive and whole. We’ll live like queens for the rest of our days!”

Her tone bares the bright, unfaltering confidence of persuasion between friends, all for show—but as everything begins to fade to grey I know I never had a choice.

“What’s going to happen to me when you take over?” I croak, but it’s too late: I am the disembodied voice now.

The last thing I remember before the smell of rot consumes me is the monster’s static, inside-out scream as she rips it free from the world to torment the galaxy once more—thirty years of excavation work in a single Terrorkinetic blast, all thanks to a lonely, starry-eyed blind girl who was stupid enough to make a deal without knowing the cost.

*     *     *
Before I wake up in the filthy coffin with the frantic chittering of broken bones assaulting my eardrums from every direction, I still feel those monstrous seismic convulsions rippling through every cell of my body. The quake is so unrelenting, so primal, that I’d bet my life that half the town will be collapsed before it’s finally through. I hear the smashing of windows, the splitting of support beams, and wonder if I’ll be buried alive before I can even open the sticky pits of my exhausted eyes.

Wait, speaking of eyes . . . No matter how hard I try to blink, even when I raise up my arm with all its brittle, creaking joints and claw at them with fingertips half-rotten, I can’t get them open. I try so hard a claw slips off as I fight and groan, but it’s no use: I’m blind again, just as I was up until that brilliant, broken day when I earned my place in the Nightmoor Asylum.

I try with every shred of my power to scream, but my vocal cords are atrophied and useless from sixteen years of disuse, not to mention half-decayed, so all I can manage is a hideous, stifled croak. My joints creak in the repulsive, pestilent protest of eternal death as I groan wildly, desperately, slamming my sad excuse for a body upward—but there’s nothing but an impenetrable slab of stone, as cold and unrelenting as the bitch who sent me here.

My screams taste like a mouthful of worms.

I’m so fucking stupid, I sputter and spew, layers of what’s left of my ‘flesh’ sloughing off as I scratch my own arms to the bone with panic. I should have listened to my gut. I should have never let her in. I should have—

As I clench my fist so hard that my claws tear through to the leathered sinew below, I whimper in a bewildering fusion of pain and shock as the coffin lid blows to a thousand tiny little pieces in every direction. Terrorkinesis, I immediately realize. Just like Elynoire used to blow me out of the asylum, and to dig up the Blood Spine in her revolting attempt to win the Grim King over and steal my life. The Grim King . . .

Everything goes hazy, but it’s not the cloud of dust still lingering over the coffin as I cough and sputter, dragging myself out onto the frigid black floor: Suddenly, I’m back at the excavation site near Stargrave, with Azgoroth’s men crowding around me—no, not me anymore, but my old body—staring. Some have a faint glimmer of jealousy behind their beady eyes, while others are utterly stupefied in amazement and fear. Some even fall to their knees and bow. The Grim King himself is more interested in the massive Blood Spine corpse now sprawling across the land, its vertebrae each ten times larger than a small house, its wide and gaping maw still infused with the terror of the ages even though it’s been hundreds of years since it burned down a town, much less an entire planet.

But soon, even Azgoroth von Marduk turns to face my usurper and nods. Somehow, I can still see through Elynoire’s eyes as he extends his hand to her, smiling as suavely as a wraith like him can smile, and thanks her for her service to the Immortal Black Dominion of Zyrgoth and all Syndragorean-kind. And as his electric violet eyes meet hers, and the shudder of disgust and loathing ripples all the way through her, far beyond her core, suddenly it all makes perfect sense.

I am her and she is me, even now. And instead of disposing of me in her rotting corpse as she intended, I’ve inherited her decomposing lump of a brain, and all her gifts along with it! Terrorkinesis, the Black Vision: Everything she used to “help” me so many times before is finally at my disposal, without her standing in the way!

Finally, my slippery old joints settle into place and I get my bearings. Even though I can’t see with my eyes, the Terrorkinetic echolocation is even better: A cold violet light pulses out from a strange red sphere at the heart of the chamber, casting a vile and sterile glow over more skeletons than anyone could ever count—some packed lovingly into heavy stone drawers, resting peacefully in the heart of the wall, and others strewn irreverently across the floor, traipsed and spat upon by whatever reckless grave robbers dare to enter.

Exploring this haunting shadow cavern feels kind of like being inside an old friend. After all, I’ve walked here a thousand times in my childhood dreams and Elynoire’s nightmares. It’s the place she was murdered by Azgoroth’s followers for knowing too much. The place she lurked for sixteen years, plotting her revenge—a revenge I now realize, in the shadow of those battered archways and skeletal black marble carvings, she always cared about far more than me.

“GO TO STARGRAVE,” a crow implores from a lightless window on the far side of the bone-drenched wall. “THE BLOOD SPINE IS YOURS NOW. THE GRIM KING IS WAITING FOR YOU.”

*     *     *
Crowned by blood and eternal chaos, in the shadow of the screaming bone colossus, the Grim King’s cloak lashes wildly in the breeze. I can see him now across time and death with the Black Vision, clearer than the moon on the coldest night of winter. I come for him slowly, creeping across the village in the dead of night, dragging myself across the ground with my claws when my knees give out. Every time I pause for a moment too long I see Elynoire worming her tendrils into Azgoroth von Marduk’s heart, bewitching him with my old body, seducing him just like she seduced me all those years ago.

As the visions grow stronger, so does my resolve—and my flesh along with it. Soon I feel the power rushing back, all the tenacity born from my years of exile interwoven with Elynoire’s psychic prowress. Branches begin to crack far above me as I slink through the forest, just as they did on the night she came into her power. By the time I’m halfway to Stargrave, the air is violently, unbearably cold, and the ground beneath my feet freezes and quakes with every step. But strangely, breathing is easier now, and my joints are no longer slippery and weak—at least, until that forlorn, enticing rasp taunts me from across the dimensions:

Marry me, Tanessa . . . Be my Grim Queen. As thanks for all you’ve done for me, the entire Black Dominion will be your throne.

I wretch worms and black bile onto the snow when I hear him whisper my old name. Her crazy plan actually worked. That’s the first and only time I really I feel like I can’t keep going. The visions are growing too strong, now, and it’s like someone has stapled my gouged-out eyes wide open and forced me to watch Azgoroth von Marduk and my usurper as they hold each other and kiss slowly, painstakingly, with the Blood Spine coiled around them in the Infernal Fields.

“I wish it would kill her,” I choke out to no one as she nuzzles into his chest, flawlessly mimicking the women of fairy tales and pulpy romance novels with my stolen skin. “I wish it would bite her head off and shred her body into a thousand little pieces right in front of him, here and now.”

Marry me, Tanessa . . .

The Blood Spine vibrates unnaturally, rhythmically as it guards them. The dissonance burrows down into my own skull, mocking me, haunting me no matter how desperately I try to look away. I’d never even kissed a man before. Why do I care more about this than the fact that she’d stolen my body to begin with? He wasn’t even that handsome, far more intriguing in aura than in flesh . . .

Be my Grim Queen . . .

“I wish it would eat her. I wish it would split her chest in two and crush her into a bloody pulp right in front of him.” But instead, he crushes her, sweetly, comfortingly . . .

The Grim King’s advisors, cloaked all in black and just as pallid and vile as he was, were ever-lurking just out of sight as always: None would dare to cross the impenetrable rift of the Blood Spine’s back that night, not even if the world itself caught on fire and burned away to dust and ash by dawn. Their ethereal necromantic auras weave between the snakelike monster’s endless spines, ensuring it stays ever-awake and ready to kill.

“I wish it would eat her fucking head off!”

Crack.

*     *     *
Last night, when the monster parted its hideous jaws and went straight for Elynoire laying splayed out on her back, I knew the crows were right about the Blood Spine being mine. Elynoire may have resurrected it using my body, but it was her brain the creature was forever bound to: A brain I now live inside and control as seamlessly as if I was born inside of it.

If the creature’s predator instincts hadn’t gone dull from six centuries of rot and ruin, the bitch would be dead right now. Well, with the wedding only moments away, at least I’ll have the perfect chance to practice my aim.

After her little display last night, the Blood Spine was banned from the wedding, of course. Azgoroth chained her up out near the bone church behind the Manor, right on the edge of the forest where I spent the night. I don’t know what her old name was, back when Azgoroth’s ancestors terrorized the Lords of Silvenmyr from her back and burned entire worlds to ash in the name of Chaos and fear, but now she’s been born again, just like me. So I’ve decided to call her Kalciver: It means “eternal fortune born through blood and pain” in the old tongue.

My parents spoke the old tongue. Perhaps when the wedding is through and the night is young, Kalciver and I will pay them a visit and thank them for sending me to the Nightmoor Asylum.

For a world-crushing colossus of spidery veins and broken bone, she seems loyal enough. She recognizes me instantly, her horns buckling with curiosity as I approach from the shadowed sanctuary of the weregrove trees—her long-lost, ever-loving surrogate mother, forever bound by Terrorkinesis and irreverent undeath.

She knows it was me who brought her back from the dead: That’s why, after I shatter her chains with my mind and evaporate them away to vapor that dissolves on the frostbitten breeze, she lowers her massive skull and allows me to take my rightful throne at the base of her neck at last.

“Fly, Kalciver! An usurper has come to kill your master!”

When she raises her hideously massive neck and ascends to her full height, carrying me far above Stargrave and the entire Nightmoor, my ears are flooded by the cracking of broken bones and the ravenous lashing of the wind.

“Kalciver, go!” I urge, digging the exposed bone of my heels into the side of one of her countless vertebrae. “We’re running out of time! The necromancers will be back any moment, and when they notice the chains are gone . . .”

The silence feels like it lingers for a thousand years, and I begin to wonder if she even understands a word I’m saying. Perhaps to a great and terrible beast like her, even the fate of an interplanetary overlord means nothing.

But when she parts her cavernous jaws and lets out the most hideous war cry I’ve heard in this life or any other, I curse myself for ever doubting her.

*     *     *
“Kill the usurper and leave Azgoroth and his men alive!” I howl over the screams of the crowd as Kalciver swoops down, rearing back her head and piercing a hole through the clouds with her necrotic beams of Terrorboric fury. “But first, bring me up close: I want to see the look on her face before you eat her! And I want you to make sure she goes down alive!”

As Kalciver hovers low over the black-ribboned chairs and elegant archways of the wedding ceremony, all but the bravest guests run screaming in fear. The vile, irreverent aura pulsing out from her core is enough to push the rest of them back by sheer force alone. She carries me straight to the Infernal Altar, where the Grim King and his bride-to-be await our arrival: One with tears of terror streaming down her face, the other with something between amusement and the slightest hint of reverence in his piercing violet eyes.

“You backstabbing, heartless, manipulative tramp!” I cry, springing off Kalciver’s back as she lowers me down, ice shards stabbing up from the altar in my wake as I storm over to Elynoire. “You pretended to be my friend for sixteen years, then you literally put me inside your rotting corpse, all so you could have the chance at getting back at Grim King Azgoroth!”

Clad in black pauldrons and violet armor licked with blood-red veins, Azgoroth has little to say on the matter.

“And you’re fucking marrying him, now?!” I scream into her face, spraying her porcelain, perfect wedding paint with worms and grave-dirt. “So did you give up on your little revenge when you realized how much power he could give you, or do you still plan to stab him in his sleep later tonight when the wedding is over?”

The Grim King doesn’t counter with his own legendary Terrorkinesis as I pin his bride down upon the burning hot marble. Does he know, I wonder? Just in case, I look him dead in the eyes with my gaping, infested sockets and hiss, “She’s the one your men killed back in the Valctyrian Ossuary fifteen years ago. The one who was digging up dirt on the Blood Spines to sell to the Lords of Silvenmyr!”

I can’t say there’s any surprise written across Azgoroth von Marduk’s face as he contemplates my words, pursing his thin lips and twitching the knifelike peaks of his ears in bleak rumination. The sting of betrayal quickly gets the best of him, and he doesn’t even bother asking if my accusations are true before reaching for the thrice-curved crimson blade at his side.

But I raise both my withering hands in protest, nodding instead up to Kalciver, who eagerly awaits my call with her six red eyes wide and hungry for blood—expectant, almost playful. “You already killed her once,” I insist, moth wings fluttering inside my rotten stomach as I realize that maybe the Grim King is handsome close-up after all. “This time, the honor belongs to—”

“Don’t kill me!” Elynoire yelps, her voice a vile and soulless mockery of mine even when she was is begging for her life. “I’ll go back to the ossuary! Just please don’t kill me,” She she whimpers, backing away, but not quickly enough to avoid the glob of acidic drool that rolls forth from Kalciver’s mouth ridge and drenches her entire torso. “W-we can switch back! Here and now, if you want!”

I stare down at my hands, acrid and raw, knuckles breaking through leathery, flaking scraps that once formed skin: Veins lifeless and taut, snaking their way up arms even sicker still—burrowed with vermin, slowly falling apart. Then, I stare back at her supple red locks cascading down over a porcelain grey face licked gently by freckles, and my lifeless sockets meet her crystalline amber pools. A tempting offer, to be sure, but the thirst for revenge runs strong in this fucked up brain I’ve inherited. No wonder she bewitched me for all my life, all for a chance of digging in her talons one last time.

“YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK . . .” Screeches the lone crow circling the tatters of the ceremony from far above. “YOU CAN ONLY GO STARWARD WITH THE GRIM KING AT YOUR SIDE.”

She expects me to say yes, I know it. She expects me to rip myself from her old skin and straight back into mine. I tilt my head back and look up at Kalciver, who’s panting excitedly, quivering with anticipation and the urge to please. If I switched back, she wouldn’t listen to me anymore, and she wouldn’t be my daughter in bone and pain.

“No. I don’t want to switch back,” I spit worms in her face again as I raise my arm to command Kalciver forward, and the few brave souls who lingered in the crowd to watch the shitshow let out a collective gasp. “I spent the first fifteen years of my miserable life totally blind, hated by my parents for being a burden, and ignored by everyone else. Then the rest of my time was spent walled off in a fucking asylum! You know what, I think I can handle spending the next thousand years as a rotting corpse if it means I get to see the look in your eyes as you scream and die.”

And scream, she does: But I can hardly hear it over the exhilarating, blood-drenched symphony swelling inside my head as I lower my arm, imploring Kalciver to snatch her leg-first like the delectable morsel of meat that she is. One of the spectators far behind us cheers as the Blood Spine doesn’t give even the shadow of a pause or a second thought before swallowing her alive. Satisfied, Kalciver collapses to the ground with a thunderous crash and rests her skull on the Infernal Altar where the wedding was meant to take place. She coils lovingly around Azgoroth and me, eagerly wagging the final vertebrae of that tail which once made dust of entire cities.

Curiosity overtakes me as a faint twinge of static dies in the back of my mind, and for a moment, everything goes black again.

If that was her life force, then she was always far weaker than I thought. Now that she’s gone forever, I wonder if Kalciver will come back to the forest with me to keep me company instead. I prepare to leave, nodding wistfully at the Grim King one final time before turning away.

But just before I prepare to call Kalciver off and head down the steps, the Grim King’s voice shatters my forlorn contemplation.

“You know, I’ve never seen anyone who wasn’t Alnilam command a Blood Spine like that.” His tone devolves into something downright sheepish, and his eyes dart anxiously away as he adds, “It was . . . dignified. Unexpected. Queen-like.”

The maggots where my heart used to be dance with joy unbound as he slips a single black rose meant for Elynoire behind my ear, and offers me his hand.

*     *     *
It’s a custom from when Zyrgoth was still Raizalar that a Grim King of Marduk would never share their name with any woman—this, or so the legends say, is why the Black Gods only give them sons. But any Queen who lays down her soul for them must forsake her old name and choose a new one, a custom I took great delight in. They now call me Grim Queen Tamorah von Heartwringer, Broodmother of All Blood Spines.

It’s rare for a woman of peasant birth to walk the halls of Stargrave as a servant, much less as a Queen, and even rarer still for a Grim Queen to reign alongside her King as an equal: But Azgoroth saw the verdant seeds potential in me when no one else did. He knew I had it in me not only to control the Blood Spine as seamlessly as my own skin, but to resurrect countless others like it: And to prove him right, I vowed to dig up every Dragonlord bone from Valctyria to the Scarfrost Mountains at the end of the world. They say my predilection for breathing new life into the monsters hasn’t been seen since Ravenmorg’s days.

Even though in the beginning I expected to hate him, Azgoroth has grown on me, and now, I can’t imagine life without him: My dead and atrophied womb is the only thing that ever threatened our love. But concubines exist for a reason, and the blood of Marduk, a rather nontraditional bunch, never had any qualms about a so-called illegitimate child inheriting his father’s titles: After all, Morg himself was the bastard of the Starless Demiurge.

I’m always nice to the girls, at least until the children are born. As for my jealousy, well, that’s another story altogether: A story that often ends with a lot of laughter on my end, and a pair of supple, smooth legs—with a few chunks missing—kicking and screaming down Kalciver’s throat.

But truly, I should be more grateful to them: After all, their delectable, young meat keeps me alive long after I should have rotted away to nothing—it gives me years uncounted with Kalciver and all our children of bone, broken and screaming and twisted like us.

The crows never stopped following me, not even long after the Immortal Black Imperium of Zyrgoth swelled into a reborn era of glory and freedom for all creatures of darkness. Their whispers grew far more sinister on the day I killed Tanessa, though.

That’s right, my dearest, most devoted friend and accomplice: She may have had my old body, but I never lost my touch. The moment I hit the bottom of the monster’s throat, I switched with her one last time, and damned her to drown in those festering pits of acid while I reveled again in my old skin, a rotting corpse with the tongue of a Grim King down my throat, just as it always should have been.

Really wish those crows would go away, though.

Really kills the mood when in the dead of night, they peck open the stained-glass windows and whisper, “SHE’LL BE BACK.”