Whatever was coming was something that frightened this. And this had been eating Sovereigns for longer than written history. The idea of what could frighten it, what could make something this old and this enormous feel the equivalent of fear, sat in me like a stone dropped in still water, the ripples going out and out.
"Why tell me?" I said. "If you want to consume me, why warn me about the thing that would stop you."
The impression that came back was complicated. It took me a moment to parse.
Self-preservation. But not only that. Something adjacent to self-preservation that was not quite what I would call interest in my survival for my own sake, but was also not entirely indifferent to it. An entity that had been eating Sovereigns for millennia had, it seemed, developed something in re
