The darkness that wrapped around Grimm was not the absence of light. It was a physical manifestation of gravity empty pocket.
The four Kevlar-carbon restraint straps shattered at the same time with the dull snap of over-stressed bowstrings. Grimm rose to his feet in the center of the dais, his physical frame undergoing its final, majestic metamorphosis.
His shoulder height settled at three point eight meters in resting stance, his length spanning nine meters from the black leather of his nostrils to the tip of his muscular tail. His coat had transformed into a dense, velvety pelt of pure deep-sea black glass that burned up every stray photon of light in the chamber. When Pip’s solar aura touched Grimm’s flank, the light didn’t reflect. It was drawn into the fur like water into sand, leaving only an outline of total, terrifying darkness.
Along Grimm’s neck bones, the bone-growth Arthur had decompressed had formed a series of low, streamlined star-iron plates that interlocked like the armor of a war galleon. His jaws were broader, heavy by dense masseter muscles capable of generating fifty-two thousand pounds of high-pressure crushing pressure.
Grimm opened his eyes.
The clouded amber of his past had burned away, replaced by twin pools of burning violet starlight that pulsed with the steady, inexorable rhythm of a collapsing pulsar.
