Len stumbled two paces back from the thundering delivery pipe. His boots splashed through the puddle of gray silt.
His right hand remained clamped over his chest bone. His fingers grabbed the wool of his torn lapels as though trying to physically smother a fire that was consuming him from within. The heat beneath his ribs was not spreading like a physical burn. It was focusing, concentrating along the linear spirit vein that ran from the hollow of his throat down to the center of his chest muscle. It throbbed with a spark, tingling rhythm that set his teeth shaking in his jaw and sent hot prickles of sweat washing across his brow.
Beneath the gap in his linen shirt, the progress band was pulsing with a vibrant, unnatural violet soft glow.
The light cast flickering purple reflections across the wet stonework pier, lighting up the mud on his trousers and the sweat dripping from his chin. It wasn’t a faint, dying ember. It was an open draft in a forge. The qualitative line had already surged past the first quarter mark, burning its way toward the third of the bar with an alarming, sped up speed that mocked the years he had spent walking northern post roads to earn his earlier improvements.
