The air inside the drowned cathedral smelled of ancient copper, burning spark wiring, and the hot, skin-burning tang of hepatic bile.
Five thousand meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic, the deep water pressure was five crushing deep-sea pressure. A crushing physical weight held back only by the huge black glass dark rock arches and heavy quartz domes of the Bermuda Void Atoll. Every few seconds, a low, groaning rumble shook through the cathedral’s load-bearing pillars as earth-shaking micro-quakes rippled along the subsea trench, sending fine cascades of fiery grit drifting down through the hazy amber light of the emergency floodlamps.
Osric Malveaux knelt in the center of the shattered altar dais, his eight-meter frame folded forward like a broken siege engine. With Suture One burned up by Pip’s solar fire and Suture Two ripped from his dorsal column by Grimm’s gravity jaws, the Patriarch was physically crippled. His left arm lay motionless in the expanding pool of blackened blood. His shattered spine was out-of-joint at a severe forty-five-degree angle, bone fragments grinding against silver-steel support brackets with every ragged heave of his chest.
Yet above that wreckage of ruined tissue, Osric’s skull was still alive.
At the base of his skull, nestled beneath a heavy collar of dark heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron plates, Suture Three pulsed with a wild, blinding violet glow.
