"That's not justice," the queen said.
"Justice?" Sonder repeated. "No. It isn't. It is what I want. That's all. I want it, and I am going to do it, and there's very little you can say that would change that."
She glanced around the throne room one last time, at the crude carvings and the torches and the banner she had seen outside with its self-important emblem. "I thought you should know before we started. It seemed fair to tell you."
The man-eaters looked at Sonder for a long moment.
"You came here to tell us that we're already dead," the king said.
"When I came here, none of you were my concern. I've come for something that none of you seem to understand. Not its power nor its value. I didn't know anything about this island until your son there started to eat people, and then I made it my problem."
She raised the staff slightly.
"But I appreciate the conversation," she said. "Really."
She started with the throne. It felt appropriate.
She raised the staff and then brought it down.
The stone cracked from the inside out, the fracture lines spreading fast, and it exploded outward.
Chunks toppled and fell.
Then she turned to the nearest wall. Stone brackets wrenched free, and the whole structure leaned outward slowly before giving way and crashing down with a sound that rolled through the floor and up through the walls.
She was almost gentle about it.
There was no effort in it, no visible strain, nothing that suggested she was working at all. She was just attending one thing and then the next.
She destroyed everything in the throne room and then the room itself.
The man-eaters began to change. Their human approximations came apart as the things they truly were expanded and took over.
At first, just one, and then more and more; the transformation moved through the group like a virus.
They were most honest like that, Sonder thought. More true to themselves.
They came at her, as it was clear that after the room, it would be their turn.
She stepped aside from the first one and pointed the staff at him.
Stone erupted from the walls in hail, hitting him hard a hundred times.
Blood flew through the air, and he hit the far wall.
The second one she let get close, close enough to feel the displacement of his wings in the air, then she pulled on his thread. Fully. More than was necessary.
He stopped mid-lunge and crashed across the floor.
The third and fourth came together.
She raised a hand, and the air between them hardened.
They struck it head-on and stopped instantly, as though they had collided with a wall that had not existed a moment earlier, which was more or less what had happened.
Sonder captured them in a barrier prison, and she shrank it down.
Until there wasn't enough space left for them and their bones broke.
More were coming in through the doors now.
She could hear them in the corridor, the sound of running and of things changing shape as they came. The throne room was filling and getting louder, and the dust from the walls and the ceiling was constant now, debris falling in small pieces where the structure was beginning to crumble.
She didn't look toward the king.
But she was aware of him.
He had not transformed. Neither had the queen, who stood very still with an expression Sonder couldn't fully read from here, watching the room come apart around her with the particular composure of someone deciding something.