The Queen of Death is dethroned. Power is free tonight. Fragments of it drift on
the winds, sift through the air, fall on the earth.
It slays the dead.
It casts down the powerful.
Stilcho shivered, his living eye widened and the dead one saw abysses.
He tottered on the edge, reached up hands cold as clay and held to Haught as to
his last and only hope.
There is something that shines and I see it, dead man.
It beckons the powerful with an irresistible lust.
And she dares not.
The dust shines and shimmers and falls everywhere and she dares not gather that
power up. She seals up the ways. She burns it with fire.
Nisi power. She loathes it and desires it.
I am Nisi, dead man. And I will have that thing. She sits blind and deaf to me
what we say she cannot know. That is my power. And it needs one thing.
Things will change, Stilcho. Consider your allegiances. Consider how you fare
when she forgets you.
He had a very clear picture then what Haught wanted. He held the image of a
shining globe that spun and shimmered. Lust was part of it, in the same way that
light was. It was raw power. It was dangerous, dangerous as some spinning blade,
as some terrible juggernaut let loose. That shining, spinning thing was a
humming regularity that beat like a pulse, that held all the gates of hell and
creation in harmony with itself, all beating away with the same thump-thump of a
living heart, that was the tiniest imperfection in this spinning. If it were
perfect there would be nothing.
The universe exists on a flaw in nothing at all.