Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) by Christian A. Brown

In the land of Chaos, the barriers between worlds are as brittle as the paper scrolls that often crumbled in her hands while she tidied Thule’s tower. Thule—yes, she remembers her sort-of-father, then her mind reclaims the man-wolf and the rest. How could she ever have forgotten Caenith, even for a speck?
    Angry and wary, understanding that Pandemonia’s pull is stronger than Alabion’s, Morigan leaves the body of her host to observe the young woman who has summoned her here. Barely out of girlhood, she is pretty in an Arhadian way: tanned from sun, dark of hair. Her eyes are as deep and telling of pain as scars burned black. She smells of the spice of knowledge, asher Wolf would say—a fragrance that coils up the nose and would have made her host sneeze if the girl herself had not been inundated by the same must since her youth. Eighteen, realizes Morigan, in a sting of knowledge. The girl is eighteen summers old. At least that’s how old she looks, but there is something eternal about her presence. Morigan receives a name, too, though not from her bees. Instead, she gleans this name from the note that her host unfurls and then crumples again and again in her hand
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    Amunai
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    The name is written at the top of the letter, its addressee. Morigan admires the beautiful writing: forests of long, tall letters, inconceivably intricate lines, surrounding pictographs similar to the scrawling in the Mother-wolf’s cavern—an ancient language, then. Morigan can read any language in this otherworld, and she scans flitting expressions of desire: my darling songbird…my dearest…another kiss, another whisper. A love letter, she realizes, of a kind any young girl would like to receive if the suitor was pleasing. Perhaps Amunai does not care for boys and their advances. Certainly, Morigan had no interest in young fools. Still, Amunai’s agitation seems inconsistent with the frustrations of early love: she looks mortified and torn. Within, Morigan senses Amunai punishing herself for these flushes in her breast. Amunai flogs the images of a trickster’s crooked smile from her mind faster than Morigan can see the rest of that face. Regardless of her apparent age, Amunai seems to possess incredible willpower, so ruthlessly does she repress her emotions
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    She burns the note on one of the hundred candles surrounding the chair and dais upon which she presides and wriggles her fingers through the ashes, as if saying goodbye. Then Amunai closes her eyes and listens. She falls into a well of thought so deep and vacant that Morigan worries about following the girl
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    B ZZT !
    Morigan floats away from Amunai to seek out the noise. She drifts down the aisles of ancient lore, wishing she had fingers with which to peruse the enticing texts. These many books with inscribed metal covers, these scriptures that hum with secrets from within their leather tubes…Morigan feels as if all the information of the world resides here—or at least all the information one would wish to know. She realizes that this young sage—a Keeper, suggest the bees—holds the knowledge of this entire library inside her smallself. After finding nothing of interest, no disturbance but for the wind ruffling through the oval windows that scares candle flames and papers, Morigan returns to the Keeper. The alcove is empty; the throne is bare. Papers drift in the air, suggesting the Keeper has just vanished in a gust of wind
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    B ZZT !
    A fly lands on Morigan’s shoulder. Wait—how is it that she has a shoulder? she wonders. In Dream, she is most often a ghost, one that cannot touch or be touched by the past
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    B ZZT !
    A glimmering green friend joins the insect, and they crawl in a figure eight on her naked white skin. Morigan hears more buzzing behind her. Her bees spark the air like firecrackers, warning her too late of the danger. It takes much to scare Morigan, a woman who has delved into Death and confronted Dreamers. Although she musters her strongest steel and