Page 173 of The Princesses of Ruin

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“I need her. Scarlett…please.”

“Scarllllett.” I imitate his words.

“My wife, my love.”

“Your mate,” I say, remembering the word she used.

He nods. “Yes, my mate.”

His frail body could never survive long in our world, but maybe if the Spider Queen protected him, he would fare well. He is desperate for her and perhaps, one day, I could come back and bring him through. The opening is too small for the Spider Queen, but he could fit.

“How many years to raise her?” I ask.

The Spider Queen told me I grew quickly, my mind enhanced by the magic of the dark goddess who infused all of us when we moved through the doorway here. But I don’t know if that is how Nyxari will grow.

“Twenty years…”

I don’t know how long that is, but the Spider Queen will.

I look up through the doorway home. She’s watching, her eyes leaking and leaving ripples on my passageway. She pulls the silk between us taut and thrums the string to our basic words she has been teaching me for hunting.

“Yes.”

I look back at the man. His gaze is pinned on the opening, on the sight of the Spider Queen.

“No less lovely,” he says, tears spilling down his cheeks.

He thinks she is beautiful, too. Good.

I climb the silk, stopping at the top.

“I will return to take you in twenty years.”

Epilogue: Ga’hanoi

Sunlight warms me through to the core. I inhale its glow, siphoning brightness into my blood even as my body begins to warp. To contort. To reduce.

I change for her. So that I may be palatable to her fragile, surface-born sensibilities.

Bitterness flowers in my mantle like dawn-blooming coral. It clings to me, thorned and luminous, even as the sun arcs above, its heat soaking into the root of my helplessness.

I was chosen.

Ishouldbe honored to serve Broodfather Vek’ihr.

But I am not.

My frame convulses—flesh cinching, limbs receding, eyes retreating into the narrow sphere of a bulbous skull. My vision will fade in spectrum. No more ultraviolet symphonies. No more dancing pulses in the current.

I will see only what she sees.

Hear only what she hears.

Feel only what she feels.

So that my exceptionality will not shame her.

I have been sentenced to the land. To wither, dying a thousand sensory deaths before Nol’Ther claims me.

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