White prongs closed around Raska's wrist.
She tore free before the white prongs met. One barb opened her glove from palm to cuff. Another scraped the black plate where her hand had been.
"It was quieter when you were inside the tree," she told Jiang.
A flight spar struck next.
It drove upward beneath the graveback's living plates and lifted a strip of its back wider than Maelin's hall. Black trunks leaned toward open road. Suspended keeps swung on tendon cords while the surviving marrow crown shed clear fruit into the dark.
Deeper in the wound, the fin answered.
The graveback twisted toward a blue starwater current passing below the confluence. Its left side pulled as if half the beast had already entered water. Its right side remained caught on the bone road.
Then the buried joint dug down.
White prongs punched through the road beneath the carrier. The entire confluence lurched around them.
