Perhaps it was the way that I held the blade, but the god must have sensed something, and it backed away from me.
A mile of it, bleeding black blood into a valley that used to be mountains, and it pulled its head back and up and looked at me with its one good eye, and its whole body went still in the air.
I knew that stillness. I have seen it many times before when something drastic was about to change. I was fighting a god, not an overgrown snake, and in that stillness, I saw the real face of my opponent.
Ah, I should have been afraid, but no, this fickle heart of mine was beating faster in excitement… perhaps there was a reason why Death itself had chosen me as her consort. Am I not always courting death?
The mouth of the serpent opened wide, stretching beyond what any normal snake was capable of, and inside that terrifying pit, words emerged and arrived inside my skull in a flat voice that I knew, without any doubt, was the voice of the System.
