The avalanche of white cold struck his chest with the physical impact of a falling granite lintel.
Jon Hale could not breathe. The air in his lungs was not expelled; it was pulled out by the roots, vacuumed into the roaring void that was collapsing the five days of siege, fire, and dead militiamen back into the iron core beneath the earth. His consciousness tumbled through a bottomless vertical drop, spinning across hours and leagues in a blinding hurricane of static frost that numbed his spine and stripped the warmth from his blood.
Then came the burn.
It was not the cold numbness of temporal rewind. It was a searing, razor-sharp branding that struck his left hand with the precise savagery of an iron chisel driven by a blacksmith’s sledge.
The fire bit directly into the bone of his left pinky. The flesh around the smallest knuckle hissed, smoking with the pungent stink of scorched skin, boiled oil, and ancient copper scale. The tenth somatic trust mark was seating itself into the living meat, carving an unyielding circle of pale, raised scar tissue that locked around the digit like a forged collar.
Jon gasped, his heels kicking out against unyielding granite.
