-- except for that. That knowledge is a bad thing.

But Skulduggery extended the offer of answers, and he's not about to go back on that offer. So he just takes an unnecessary breath, his eyeless gaze on Ghastly's sewing.

"Erskine revealed his city," he says. "I helped defend it from Warlocks. After that, Darquesse rose. We beat her." A pause. "Well, we actually sent her into the dimension with the Faceless Ones, since she was pretty much unkillable, but it amounts to the same thing. The problem was no one saw fit to tell us activating the Accelerator also started a countdown to the end of the world, and the only way to stop that countdown was to offer it a willing soul. You can probably guess what happened after that."