The water in the drainage flume had turned grey, coated in a thick scum of stone powder and greasy black soot.
Jon Hale knelt in the cold slurry, his knees braced against the foundation blocks, his hands still trembling from the heat of the smoldering wool cloak. He did not pull the fabric entirely away from Sir Cael Ardent’s chest; he eased the coarse fibers back an inch at a time, watching for fresh bleeding or renewed sparks from the molten chainmail.
There were no sparks left.
The celestial light was dead.
In its place lay the brutal, unsparing reality of physical trauma.
The flattened gold disk of the Returner seal was no longer a badge of imperial favor. Scorched and cracked against his collar-bone, it sat dark and pitted upon the raw hollow above his clavicle. It had not vaporized into nothingness; the coin remained physically present, its heavy gold body scored with hairline stress fractures from the intense thermal backdraft, resting firm against the charred tissue over the bone. The fine imperial filigree that had adorned the seal was blackened by soot and heat, but its circular outline held together—a scorched, cracked disc anchored directly over his collar-wound, preserved and physically intact for whatever transfer or extraction the coming days would bring.
