Brother Ren stepped across the shimmering threshold into the Grand Silk Exchange.
The moment his bare, linen-wrapped feet touched the flat stone slabs where the brick, marble, and rotting timber intersected, a violent, high-pitched screech tore through the square. The sound of reality’s atom-deep fabric screaming as it was forced to accommodate a living martyr.
A level blast wave of crushing force struck him dead in the chest.
An ordinary man would have been bisected on the spot, his torso snapped into the marble timeline. Meanwhile, his legs remained in the brick. But Brother Ren didn’t flinch. He didn’t raise a shield.
He fell to his knees in the center of the entrance hall. He set his cracked lead basin upon the stones. Then he spread his scarred arms wide.
Martyr’s Osmosis.
“I accept the divergence,” Brother Ren whispered, his breath steady, his eyes looking upward toward the vaulted ceiling where three conflicting roofs groaned. “I accept the grief of the unlived year. Let the contradiction fall upon my bone.”
A blinding, dual-colored radiance erupted from his chest.
