The horror of an un-burned resurrection was not the arrival of rotting corpses. It was the arrival of impossible anatomy.
Down in the black, stone-scummed water of the underwater nave. There, the thirty silver Praetors had been crushed beneath forty tons of collapsing aqueduct vaulting less than an hour ago, the surface began to boil with violent, inverted rough churning. Water didn’t splash outward. It was drawn inward toward thirty distinct vortexes, swirling in counter-clockwise eddies that defied the natural drainage slope of the chamber.
Ren Vale leaned over the iron barricade. His fingers gripped the cold lead sheeting until the metal groaned under his knuckles.
A heavy silver breastplate broke the surface of the foaming pool. But the dark, congealed blood that had poured from the dead soldier’s throat and ears was not scattering into the water. It was flowing backward against the current. Long, steaming ribbons of dark crimson that coiled like living serpents, re-entering the jagged puncture wounds and stitching the torn muscle fibers together with sickening, wet snaps.
Above the water, fragments of crushed quartz visors that had shattered against the dark rock floor leaped upward through the air, defying gravity to seat themselves back into the silver bezels of the helmets, their spider-web fractures melting into un-marred, seamless clarity.
