Akhil felt his mind fracture.
Not breaking exactly—fragmenting. Parts of his consciousness that had been unified splitting into competing impulses, desires, hungers. The part that was still him—still Akhil, still the tactician who'd led his team through impossible scenarios—shrank to a corner of his awareness and watched with horror as something else expanded to fill the space.
The Monarch.
Not fully. Not yet. But closer than before. So much closer.
His eyes, which had glowed faint crimson since the transformation, ignited. Pure blood-red radiance that cast shadows in directions light shouldn't reach, that made looking at him directly uncomfortable in ways that had nothing to do with brightness.
His skin, already white, went beyond pale into something that looked carved from bone or snow or things that had never been alive. Not corpse-pale. Something else. The white of winter's killing cold, of the void between stars, of absence given form.
And then his back tore open.
