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Ánar’s bootheels echoed on the iron floor. What a groundbreaking honor this ceremony was for a landless tenant like him—joining old house Veivilkas, of the wolf. Such an honor that it made him leaden to think of, made him long for sleep. At the conclusion of the ceremony, he would no longer be merely Ánar from the undercity, scarab-kin, but Ánar Veivilkas. Nobility. The first scarab-kin to wear that name, no less.

Those who bore the Veivilkas name bore also their curse. The wolf-form they could assume would eventually twist their bodies into the shuffling horned monsters he saw haggling for feasts, hunched beside their younger relatives, who translated their grunts and gestures to sensible words.

The curse was an honor he could not refuse. He’d tried, but the Sovereign would see him landed, cared-for in old age—as a wolf. The land he’d turned down, but what could he say to the second offer? That he preferred to die, human, in the gutters? Plenty of veterans passed in the arms of drink, winter, or the corpse-blood of the god-dragon that ran through their streets. Easy to imagine dying alone, nameless, and broke—harder to imagine being a monster of muscle and fangs, dying in bed.

Ánar had drunk the dragon’s blood himself. Even now the yearning for it returned. He’d drunk heady with the joy of slaying a god, spattered with its blood, kneeling at the Sovereign’s side as she beheaded the dragon.

Its tourmaline head fell, eyes shut. Its blood scalded his mouth, and when he looked up, the dragon’s eye, big as his head, had opened. In a pupil the size of his hand, he saw himself and the Sovereign, animals bathed in blood who fancied themselves its equal simply because they were its butchers.

When the dragon’s blood began to leak from the throne room through the fine-set obsidian tiles, Ánar felt that maddening hunger again. They called it the Sovereign’s gift. None but the three present—Ánar, the Sovereign, and her man Revna—knew about the god-dragon’s living corpse; to speak of it would be heresy. Ánar agreed to this so-called honor in order to be as far from the memory as possible. He expected they also wanted him to forget.

Well. To forget, and for that guarantee of a life of retirement.

Ánar knelt at the center of the black room, floor scarred with a century of scraping claws. To either side of him stood two scions of Veivilkas, marked in their own ways by the curse: hair tufting from one’s pointed ears, the other with bright yellow eyes and black talons that shone as they fidgeted.

It was Revna himself waiting, his arms folded. Silver flashed in Revna’s eyes, mirrored in the lines shot through his skin. Dark magic, his own body a conduit for forces Ánar did not care to understand.

“Oh, you’re now His Lordship Veivilkas as well?” Ánar said, head bowed.

“Lord Veivilkas, who stands behind me, has kindly granted me permission to oversee the ritual,” Revna said, unbothered. “He will begin officiation.”

With a chill, Ánar realized the stooping shadow behind Revna was a beast, fully twice Revna’s height, crowned in iron. Branching horns held the crown to his head. His fur bristled, mangled in spots. His yellow fangs bared as his maw split into a gruesome, vile-smelling grin— but he did not speak. The lord-wolf gestured. Revna stepped aside, a familiar calculating smile on his sallow face.

Ánar didn’t have time to study the expression. The two scions stepped forward, each looping an arm around Ánar’s shoulders, knocking the breath from him and pinning him to the ground.

Ah. This was going to hurt.

He didn’t mean to struggle. It was a side-effect of panic.

“It doesn’t hurt for long,” the one with the ears whispered.

“It’s worth it,” the other one, with the talons, hissed.

Anything he’d had to be told was worth it wasn’t. Ánar grasped for words to make either of these grim-eyed children crack their façade, or Revna sigh in impatience—just to lift his own mood—but Lord Veivilkas already stooped over him, digging a crooked claw into Ánar’s wrist. As the blood bubbled up over his skin, Veivilkas dug into his own wrist as well.

Veivilkas pressed their wrists together, rumbling. The lord-wolf’s bristles were coarse. Worse than the wound. Ánar choked down his cry. This was not murder. They had all survived this. It’d be over soon, if he endured.

“His heart’s blood to yours,” Talons said. “His name to yours.” Translating? Their eyes shone with zealotry.

Whatever else Talons said was lost in the pain. Ánar’s youth had long passed but he still remembered the ache from waking taller and this pain was that a thousand-fold, splitting his skin, leaving him throbbing and broken. He felt the hunger he’d felt seeing the dragon’s corpse, his self peeling away until he was fang and claw and nothing more, his back unfurling to lace, his swollen flesh hardening to shell—shell?

Talons flinched back. “Wings?” they said in disbelief, no longer holding him down.

Ánar struck, seizing their arm in his jaw and severing it. It was not so fine a meal as the blood of a god, but it thrilled him nonetheless.

The lord-wolf roared or shrieked; to his side, Revna stepped back, the silver in his arms crackling with arcs of light.

“Interesting,” Revna said, mildly. “The Sovereign’s blood? Or the scarab’s influence?”

“Liar! You did not say he was scarab-kin!” Ears said, crouched, skin rippling with the beginning of fur.

“Oh, are the effects known? You should have told me before I set up this little experiment, Vilke. I thought it would kill him.”

Betrayer! Ánar would have shrieked, but his split maw no longer formed words. Even if he lived, he could no longer speak of the truth of the dragon’s blood.

The lord himself turned on Revna, but he was old. Slow. Ánar, reborn, was much faster.