One of them speaks. The language is pre-linguistic, more vibration than words, but Rhea understands it the way bone understands gravity.

“Fee-fi-fo-fum.” Old magic, even here. A nursery rhyme that won’t be written for ten thousand years, already encoded in their DNA. “I smell the blood of a god-born one.”

Rhea laughs. It comes out broken, half-sob, but it’s still a laugh.

She spreads her arms — blood on her hands, the stones pulsing brighter behind her.

“So,” she says, voice raw and terrible and utterly, devastatingly Elena. “Who wants to get pounded on the head with a stone?”