What is time? Men had imagined time was a measurable thing, that time could be counted and systematised by the movement of planets, the glimmering of stars. But time obeyed no fixities. Time flowed, stopped, trickled.

  Here, time had ebbed to a syrupy drip. It oozed like honey between his fingertips. Its sweetness was eternal, also like honey, but the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped from him.

  Many had died in the embrace of the goddess. He knew this, but only in the hazy moments he surfaced from the waters of her deep power. He would awaken suddenly, sprawled across some flowerbed, or tangled in the limbs of some vine. She would be gone from him. His heart would ache. He would cry out like a babe abandoned for her love.

  Then her light would appear between the murky trees. She would come. Her face—Iliyet’s face—would shine like the moon. She would come to him naked, with open arms. Wrap her legs about him.

  Ravish him.

  Drain him.

  Yes, she was Goddess of Vampires, too. His life-force was her food. It was a black art even among the gods, and had rendered many mortals as dust. But The Warden was as no other mortal. God, man, and Daimon lived in him. He had so much to give. So much.

  And yet, he knew he was withering. Dying. With each eruption of pleasure, he felt his powers growing dimmer. Never in his wildest dreams or nightmares could he have imagined this was how he would die. Always, he had died in battle. Cut open by some sword. Smashed to pieces by a hammer. Never filling the empty Void of the goddess’s immortal hunger. Never spilling himself into the dark ocean of boundless lust.

  Time.

  Time ran and ran. He knew it was passing him, fleeing him. But he could not grasp it. He was a wasp stuck in the sticky honey-trap. He was an insect to her.

  Yet it seemed she took great delight in his endurance.

  She cooed to him as they made love. She whispered praise. It was maternal, almost, which sickened him. But he could do little to resist now. His mind was fleeing down the same runnel as his life-force.

  If he did not break free soon, he would be dead.

  And then the goddess’s invasive forces met a wall, a wall within him, a wall he had forgotten was there. She sifted hungrily through the murky syrup of his being, but she found solidity beneath.

  Now that he could reshape his body with Daimonic power he felt less substantial. It was as though he were not really there, in the world, merely tethered by some dark memory. He had no fixed form and he had chosen this draconian garb for its function, but it was not him.

  Who was he, then?

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  The goddess was discovering this for him. The vampiric energies had sank deeper and deeper and now they latched with frantic hunger onto this strange… object… within him. Were he a physician, he might have thought it a tumorous lump, but he was beyond such ailments now.

  It was foreign. Or perhaps, it was the opposite. Perhaps it was more him than all these other extremities, but he had become so alien to himself it now seemed out of place. The last pearl of his True Self, concealed within the assorted scum he had dragged into his orbit. Pieces of beast, man, and dragon had been accumulated like scum at the bottom of a well. But this hardness, this jewel… This was what remained of Koronzon Hammyr. Somehow his mind, now able to control his form, had rendered this truth literal. There was a solid rock at the core of him. Impenetrable as diamond.

  Impossible for the goddess to breach.

  The Shell! he realised. He had thought it a place in his mind, and in some ways he was right. But it was also the place for his mind, where the last decimated holdout of his former self resided, defending itself to the stubborn last.

  He smiled then. She ravished him, harder and harder. He spilled and spilled. But there was no more life for him to give. He was withered, a husk. He saw himself now. The veil of illusion had lifted and revealed his skeletal body, no more than dry fabric clinging to dusty bones. But there was a protrusion in his stomach—like a cancer. The Shell. The Pearl. The last refuge of his Self.

  The Daimon had not saved him. Nor had the power of a god. No, it was his mortal mind, his mortal hope, that had resisted the awful power of Lileth.

  “You will give me all!” she cooed, but there was desperation in it now. “You will give me your very last!”

  “No,” he whispered.

  And then his body was rupture. The eel-forms exploded from the pores of his skin. Tiny ones. Microscopic parasites, wriggling like maggots glad of the wound. They latched onto her, suckered her flesh, pulling it taut. She screamed. Recoiled. But as she lurched backward she drew him with her. He was still inside her. And he was latched to her like a barnacle to the belly of a ship. He threw his arms about her.

  “Embrace me now, False Goddess!” he screeched through broken lungs. “Embrace me as you once did! Is my love not wondrous!”

  She screamed again. Tried to draw back. He pulled her tighter, tighter. The Daimon within him screamed too, using up the last of its vitality in this desperate surge. All or nothing. His entire mess of a form was a flower seeking light. Weeds. Tangled, knotted, breaking through the concrete of bone to scrabble for sunlight.

  And the sunlight was her.

  Drink, drink, drink!

  Once more he tasted a god’s sweetness. Once more he tasted life eternal and unknowable. The alienness was part of its savour. He tasted the inhospitable winds of Nilldoran in her blood, the carcass-heavy frosts of the Desolate Peaks, the fathomless depths of the Empty Sea. He tasted it all. Relished it. Felt himself swelling like a gourd in summer, nearly to bursting. His old strength was there, returned to him. But there was hers too to take.

  “No!” she begged. “Please! No! I only meant—. Spare me! No! Not… Not like… I’ll give you… Iliyet! I’ll be…”

  Drink, drink, drink. No mercy. As the mosquito clings to the vein that sustains it, he drank. He was not even vaguely human; he resembled a roiling mass of grave worms. Eager. Hungry. Falling over her. Enveloping in the tide.

  He collapsed on top of her and buried her. The Shell within him was heavy as a boulder, pinning her to the ground as the worms writhed.

  I am Death!

  Death! Death! Death!