Page 106 of An Invocation of Monsters

I was relieved to see nothing sexual in his assessment. “Good, Kiraxis. We will meet again when my Lady commands it.”

I blinked. Kase’s words were the first thing that popped into my head, calling me the Lady of the Open Door.

But this Mlul’dra clearly did not mean me.

The Mlul’dra cast his assessing gaze over the lake, then the ruins, and then his eyes lit on me once more before he loped away, moving swiftly on six limbs and vanishing into the forest.

“What?” I asked out loud, watching the grass sway from his passage. “The heck?”

“I am overjoyed that Rask is pleased with my choice,” Kiraxis said proudly. “He is a very brave Mlul’dra warrior. He comes from the seed of the Starsmasher. I am only a seed from the World-Ender, but one day I will also have the warrior-pattern on my fur.”

“The spirals?”

“Yes. Mlul’dra warriors gain them with age and wisdom.”

So, like the Klee, the Mlul’dra underwent their own metamorphosis of sorts. How fascinating.

But I couldn’t focus on that just now.

He carried me towards the cavern as my thoughts reeled. “Who is he? Who is the Lady he’s talking about?”

“He is Rask,” Kiraxis said, frowning as he thought. “A strong Mlul’dra. He was the one who guided me to find my own place. I do not know his lady, though. You are the only lady who matters to me.”

As sweet as that was, it didn’t even remotely answer my questions.

I was formulating a different way to ask the question—trying to make it as blunt and literal as I possibly could—but Toth fluttered to Kiraxis’s side, his face grim.

“You must come with me,” he said to both of us, his voice tense. “You will find this of interest, though it is disturbing, Elle.”

Kiraxis growled low in his throat, following the moth-like monster into the forest. I recognized where we were when I saw the wide gap of the ravine’s mouth.

I supposed Toth had been planning to dispose of the creature’s corpse here. My stomach turned when I saw the body on the ground, and then shock made me sit upright.

The limbs he’d torn off the thing were already gone, probably at the bottom of the ravine.

But the body lying on the ground was not the thing that had hunted me.

“Let me down, please,” I asked Kiraxis, and he complied. I walked carefully across the grass, avoiding the droplets of blood on the ground.

In death, the creature had… changed.

It was still skeletally thin, the legs wasted away.

But the remaining arms were jointed like a human’s. There were a few thin, long black hairs growing from its scalp.

I recognized the face, twisted though it was.

“This… this creature was Tasha Vintner,” I said through numb lips.

Ruined, warped, twisted almost beyond recognition… but it was undeniably Tasha.

I sank to my knees, staring at the body before me, then abruptly turned to the side and threw up in the grass.

Toth held my hair back, and Kiraxis gently stroked my back as I emptied my stomach of what little was in it.

It was embarrassing to do this in front of my monsters, but as Toth whispered soothing words to me, I quickly discarded that embarrassment.

There was nothing to be ashamed of in the sight of seeing a human being dead before me.

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