The black puddle of dark oak-ink and Ink-Rot blood on the dark rock flat stone slabs didn’t spread according to the mundane laws of fluid dynamics.
Under the careful power of the Conservator’s Guild, the liquid rose in razor-sharp, sharp-angled lines of violet fire, carving a fifty-foot circle of binding script across the center of the Anchor Platform. It was the ancient Matrix of Final Record. The defensive legal charter that country notaries used to freeze disputed deeds and fraudulent wills before corrupt judges could stamp them with the seal of the Crown.
Every stroke of the mammoth ivory awl cut through the thin layer of stone grease on the stones, searing a rock-solid, linear truth into the foundation of the Sunken Temple. What was done is done. What was broken remains broken. The ledger is closed.
Wherever the violet ink touched the dark rock, the backward flickering of the resurrected Praetors came to a shuddering, violent halt.
The causal counter-current shattered. The soldiers’ flickering bodies were dragged by the throat back into a single, concrete timeline. Bruised, bleeding, and entirely subject to terrestrial gravity. The wounds that had been un-bleeding tore open again with wet, blood spurts. The quartz visors that had reformed into seamless glass exploded inward under air pressure. The thirty resurrected men let out a collective, ragged scream as forty tons of moving trauma from their original deaths caught up with their flesh in a single, devastating heartbeat.
