Ildiko shuddered as its cold gaze caressed her. She battled Anhuset’s confining grip again and lost. The eidolon crouched next to the still body at his feet and reached out a hand. Whatever this eidolon was, it wasn’t the Brishen she knew. Ildiko recoiled as bile threatened to surge from her stomach to her throat. “The soul of the Kai,” he said in a hollow voice devoid of any warmth, any life. The Elsod edged forward and froze when the king’s incandescent gaze landed on her. “Wraith King.” Gaeres’s voice held both wonder and horror. The luminescence dulled and lost its incorporeal quality, thickening from cloudy light to a true, solid form-one dressed in lamellar armor with long black hair and a single eye that glowed a preternatural blue, as if someone had dropped a torch into a vat of Dragon Fire and let it ignite. Its edges solidified, taking on hard angles and lines, a macabre butterfly emerging from its cocoon. It began to lighten, reversing in color to what it was before-black to indigo, to cobalt and finally azure.

The dark light, now a separate entity, continued its heartbeat pulse. Ildiko was almost knocked flat on her back when she reached for him only to run straight into Anhuset’s outstretched arm. His face was no longer the dolphin-gray with its undertones of pink and blue, but ashy-white with jagged black lines that stretched from his neck into his scalp. “Let me pass, Anhuset!”īrishen’s body lay in the snow, unmoving, bloody. Ildiko would have none of it and tried to dart to the side, only to be efficiently blocked by her guard. Everyone leapt back, and Anhuset shoved Ildiko behind her. The shroud of black light suddenly heaved upward with an audible snap. If the old crone had turned Brishen into a demon, she’d carve her into pieces and feed her to him. Ildiko whined softly before casting the Elsod a murderous look. “That is how galla look.” Megiddo’s words dropped like boulders into the sea of quiet.

It spasmed and stretched before collapsing in on itself, only to extend once more as if struggling to break free of a shackle. Ildiko’s lungs threatened to burst with the need to scream, but she held silent, watching as light, which had become darkness, swallowed her husband whole.

Eidolon wraith kings