The Archon’s light pulsed. Discordant, inhuman laughter reverberated through Elisabeth’s mind, driving splinters through her thoughts. Cracks erupted across the floor and split the tiles. The highest tier of balconies—the only one left now—sagged like an unraveling ribbon, its railing and ladders lifting away. Above them, the Otherworld’s constellations had engulfed the dome, but grimoires still ascended in endless streams, committing themselves to ashes. So much loss, so much sacrifice. How could this be the end?

Her mind reeled. When Ashcroft wrenched in her grasp, her numb fingers released him. As though from a great distance, she watched him heave himself toward the circle, awkward on his knees, and raise his face to the light.

“At last, it is time. Great One, I would make a bargain with you.”

Another peal of laughter shook the library. The Archon blazed higher, stretching above the second story balconies. Elisabeth was no longer certain that the corona of spikes around its head was a crown. Now, those shapes were beginning to look more like horns.

Ashcroft groaned and slumped forward, shaking his head to clear it of the awful sound. A hint of confusion clouded his face as he looked up again. “I don’t understand. Do you speak to me, Great One? I cannot hear your voice.”

“You will never hear it, Chancellor,” Silas whispered. He sat clasping Nathaniel’s limp hand. “You are but an ant, striving for the surface of the sun. To hear its voice would burn your ears to cinders, and turn your mind to ash.”

Ashcroft never took his eyes from the Archon. “No. I am different—this is my birthright. For three hundred years, this has been my destiny. My father, and his father—we have devoted ourselves to nothing else. I am worthy—” He grew hoarse.

The Archon tilted its unearthly horned head this way and that, inspecting the confines of the circle, not paying him any attention whatsoever. Grayness stole over Ashcroft’s features. He looked down at the circle, at the tiles that had cracked, breaking its pattern.

A giant luminous hand pressed against the air, and pushed. A stench of burning metal filled the atrium as the claws warped, coming up against an invisible membrane, and then drove through, reaching outside the circle. Ashcroft rocked back, eclipsed by the light stretching above him. When the palm descended, he didn’t try to move, only sat gazing up, waiting for the end, and Elisabeth had to admit she wouldn’t mind it, watching Ashcroft get swatted like a fly.

Instead the hand came crashing down on emptiness; she had seized him by the arm and dragged him away. As though he were a bundle of rubbish, she tossed him aside.

“Why?” he asked, rolling over, looking at her standing over him much as he had the Archon an instant before. “Why did you—?”

“I wanted to see your face when you realized you were wrong,” she said. “That everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve hurt and killed, was for nothing.”

Behind him, the Archon’s claws raked through the marble. Its light stretched higher, almost touching the dome, blotting out half the atrium as it spread its wings. Dwarfed by its immensity, Ashcroft looked impossibly small. Sweat had broken across his brow; his throat worked. “Are you satisfied, Miss Scrivener?”

Elisabeth had desired this moment so greatly: his confidence shattered, his power stripped away. But now that she had it, she realized it was worth nothing to her at all.

“No,” she said, and turned.

His face contorted. He scrabbled after her, collapsing to a crawl, his eyes blank and unseeing. “You must believe me. I need you to understand. Everything that I did, I did for the good of the kingdom. Please—”

She kicked him, and he went sprawling with an anguished cry.

Not caring what happened to him next, she went to Nathaniel. His eyelashes fluttered at her approach, but he didn’t wake. She crouched, taking his hand, and saw that Silas still held the other, clasped between his own as though it were spun from glass.

Light spilled over Nathaniel, reflecting brighter and brighter from the floor around him. She supposed the Archon would kill them at any moment, but all she could think was that his hand felt terribly cold. “Is he in any pain?”

Silas spoke without looking away from Nathaniel’s face. “No. The end, when it comes, will be swift for you both. I imagined it would be better this way—for you to fight together, and to fall quickly, rather than enduring the death of your world without hope.” He paused to smooth the lapel of Nathaniel’s coat, then to carefully straighten his collar. As though it were an ordinary evening, Elisabeth thought, making him presentable to step outside. “I apologize for taking such a liberty.”

Tears flooded her eyes, and her throat tightened. “What will happen to you?”

He betrayed himself with the slightest hesitation. Finally he said, “It matters not, miss.”

“It does.” She reached out to cup Silas’s cheek. The evening’s trials had left her hand filthy, hideous against his remote perfection. But he held very still, and allowed her to touch him, and she was surprised to discover that he felt human, not like a statue carved from alabaster.

A strange serenity came over her. There was one thing left that she could do. This was the end of the world, and they had nothing left to lose. “Thank you. I just wanted to say that, before . . .”

His eyes flicked to her beneath his lashes. She saw the moment that he understood. She had thought him still before, but now he turned to stone. Though his expression didn’t seem to change, there welled up in his eyes both wretchedness and hope, and a hunger so bottomless she could feel it yawning beneath his skin, like the devouring dark of a night without stars. The light had grown blinding; the Archon was almost upon them now.

“Silariathas.” The Enochian name poured up her throat and rolled over her tongue like fire. “Silariathas,” she said, her voice raw with power, “I free you from your bonds of servitude.”

His pupils swelled, black swallowing up the gold. That was all she had a chance to see before the light grew so bright that she had to avert her eyes. A pulse traveled through the library, stirring her hair, as though a stone had been dropped onto the surface of reality, its ripples flowing outward. She gripped Nathaniel’s hand, waiting to die. But a second passed, and then another—and she felt nothing.

Nathaniel’s eyelids cracked open. The silver had bled from his hair. Groggily, he tried to focus. “Silas?” he managed.

Slowly, Elisabeth looked up. For a heartbeat she thought she had died after all, and was dreaming. Silas stood over them, one arm raised, blocking the Archon’s light. Not Silas. Silariathas. Horns curled from his scalp, white as porcelain, their spirals ending in wicked points. The angles of his face had grown unsettling and cruel, their delicate beauty filed to inhuman sharpness. His ears were pointed; his claws had lengthened, thin and razor sharp.

He did not seem to have noticed the Archon. He was staring down at Nathaniel, black-eyed and starving. “You dare address me so?” he hissed. With a contemptuous jerk of his arm, he flung the Archon’s hand away. Then he rounded on Nathaniel, bending over him. He was shaking; his hair trembled. He said in a horrible rasping whisper, “Are you aware of what I am—what I will do to your world, as its people flee screaming across the broken earth?”