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Twilight realized it was probably the closest the creature would come to complimenting them.

She could not see the details of its body well, even with eyes so attuned to darkness. It was a shapeless bulk of black and silver flesh constantly shifting in a way simultaneously sensual and discordant. Tiny sparks of magic burst and squeaked into being around it constantly-if anything about it could be said to be constant. Its heads and mouths twitched, as though it skipped through time and space every few heartbeats, the number varying as time passed. The six empty hands waved about, casting blank gazes this way and that.

"Chaos embodied," she whispered in a tone both bleak and awed.

Even though she had never seen one, nor wanted to, Twilight could tell at a glance that something was the matter with this sharn. Multicolored veins stood out along its sinuous frame, and here and there, tightly clustered matrices of light gleamed through its skin like radiant bones. Its mouths constantly oozed green-white fluid, and half its eyes had gone white, as though blinded, or burst entirely, leaving dripping sores.

"My-my lord Sharn," Twilight said with a bow.

"Ruukthalmuramaxamin," it corrected in two syllables, not looking at her. "Elf ssssings like bird on the wing."

From its display of Art and the presence of its guardians, Twilight realized that this creature controlled the golems they had seen. And that meant… Taslin.

"Not I. The hangman not mine, the death of thine not mine."

"What do you…?"

"Ssssilence!" it shouted thrice, its voice shaking the temple. She heard the scream in her mind louder than outside it, a vice that crushed her head.

Twilight fell to her knees. Doom was upon her-how dare she speak, or even think. The sharn could snuff out her existence with a thought. She had no right to…

Liet.

She knew she was mad to show spine to a sharn. But Twilight was simply too tired and heartbroken-too worn-to care. She struggled onto one knee, looked it in the eye-an eye, anyway- and said, in a tone that would brook no argument, "What have you done with my friends?"

Silence reigned in the chamber.

One warm afternoon, Lilten had told her a legend of a sharn who turned a cabal of mighty sorcerers to toadstools and fed them to a gibbering mound-which it had summoned with a gesture much like what mortals use to stifle a sneeze. This was simply for pausing, confused, when the sharn asked for goblin pelt tea. Then it annihilated an unseen servant that delivered the noxious brew, on the grounds that it tasted bad.

In short, questioning a sharn was madness.

The sharn laughed. Rather, its central head laughed. The head on the right muttered homicidal promises in a long forgotten language Twilight only understood with the talisman. The third serenaded her with an ode to a desert posy in some ancient dialect of Elvish that predated the Crown Wars.

"Very well," it said. "Prisonerssss."

"Release them," she said, then quickly amended it to, "such I desire. Name-"

The sharn just laughed. "You dessssire, detesssst, dessserve nothing!"

The declaration rippled through the air, and the golden ooze caked on the ceiling hissed with a thousand spells and memories flooding through it.

Twilight found herself prostrate on the ground. Betrayal lay beneath paralyzed fingers. "Test me, then," she said.

The sharn did not pause, as though it expected this, and immediately shouted at her again, this time in a sort of half-mad, half-ordered poem. "Child of liessss, liar in love, lover of children," the sham's three heads said, each beginning at the last's final word, eerily like a roundsong. "Do you know your mother, father, daughter?"

"My lord Sharn, this is not what I ask," Twilight said, rising to her feet.

For the first time, Ruukthalmuramaxamin turned all of its eyes upon the shadowdancer, and Twilight sank to her knees with a cry. Her head burst into flame within and she screamed, pressing her palms to her temples. This wasn't the mind-scream. It