The threshold of the Cinder Gate was forty feet wide. Every square inch of it became an altar of moving agony.
Ren Vale stood in the center of the opening, his mammoth-ivory awl gripped in his right hand, his teeth bared in a snarl of desperate focus. Around him, the air didn’t smell of mountain rain or crushed pine. It smelled of scorched thick parchment, burning iron, and the electric ozone of four divergent lifetimes exploding within a single mortal nervous system.
The Speculum of Forfeited Paths in his breast pocket was screaming.
All four tiers of the silver mirror were fully ignited, blazing through his wool tunic in blinding nested circles of silver, gold, crimson, and ash. The metal casing had heated until it blistered the skin across his chest bone, but Ren couldn’t even feel the burn. His mind was being drawn and quartered across four distinct planes of reality.
He could taste Vane’s vintage port wine and bitter salicin spirit-extract coating his tongue.
He could feel the Emperor’s shattered jaw, the painful ache of forty years of saddle-calluses, and the cold iron plate pressing against broken ribs.
He could feel Brother Ren’s rotting lung thick spit, the choking wheeze of rotting plague-scars, and the gentle, sorrowful weight of a thousand dying confessions.
