The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and..

there wasn’t much for this artist to capture beyond a male
body’s general, well-muscled shape.
“How do they breathe?” I asked again because that
seemed like a fairly important question.
Casteel’s lips twitched as Kieran’s eyes closed. “If it was
a Gyrm?” Jasper spoke, rising from the chair to look down at
the drawing. “They don’t need to breathe because they are
not alive.”
Confusion drew my brows together. “How is that
possible? How can something walk around and interact with
people and not be alive?”
“One could ask the same question about the Craven,”
Casteel said. “They react to those around them. They have
mouths, and their bodies go through the motions of
breathing. They hunger.” He lowered his glass to his knee.
“But do you think they live? Truly?”
I didn’t need to think about that. “No,” I said, looking
back at the sketch. “Not once they turn. They’re no longer
alive. Nothing remains that makes them mortal, at least.”
And that was sad because all of them had been mortal
at one time—people who had lives and were someone’s
daughter or son, friend or lover—before the Ascended
ripped everything away from them.
My hands curled into the soft material of the robe. The
number of lives the Ascended had destroyed was utterly
incalculable. They could’ve done that to Ian and to Tawny,
devastating everything that made them who they were.
The Ascended had to be stopped.
“The difference here is that the Gyrms were never alive
in the first place,” Kieran explained, running a finger along
sentences that looked like nothing more than scribbles on
an ivory page to me. “They were created from the soil of the
gods and from the eather—from magic—and used to do the
bidding of the one who summoned them. Created them.
They have no thoughts, no will beyond why they were
summoned.”