The heat didn’t merely drop. It ceased to be a physical measurement.
Ren Prime’s lungs seized in his chest, the stone salt water inside his brass breathing collar freezing solid into brittle quartz needles that sliced open his throat. He fell to one knee on the dark rock flags. His hands grabbed the stone, his eyes wide as he stared into the six-inch mirror shard held by Heresiarch Lyra.
The cathedral was gone. The city of Val-Khorat was gone.
Around them stretched the boundless, silent expanse of the Seventh Void. A desert of crushed grey time ash stretching to an empty horizon beneath a sky devoid of stars, moons, or clouds. The only movement was the slow, rhythmic tumbling of silver sand drifting across black glass. It was the end-post graveyard of every timeline that had ever been pruned from existence. Billions of unlived years, cold and quiet as powdered bone.
And floating in the center of the shard was a face.
It was Ren Vale’s face.
Not the weary, ink-stained face of a nineteen-year-old scribe, nor the cynical face of Vane, nor the scarred majesty of the Emperor. It was an ageless face, carved from cold gold-silver metal and frozen time. It was surrounded by a shroud of drifting time ash that shifted between pitch-black and blinding silver. His eyes were not human eyes. They were flat, mirror-surfaced pools reflecting ten thousand collapsing great realms.
