To exist within the slowdown field of an apex entity was to drown in cold syrup.
The wave washed over the apex sanctum. Then, Ren Vale felt his breath seize in the middle of his throat pipe. It wasn’t that his lungs lacked oxygen. It was that the cold air and oxygen molecules in the freezing mountain air had suddenly got the physical heavy rush of wet mortar. Inhaling needed a conscious, violent contraction of his between-rib muscles that sent sharp, burning spasms through his thirty-one-year-old ribs.
He tried to blink.
His eyelids dropped across his eyeballs like lead shutters sliding over greased stone. He took two full seconds to complete a single reflex.
Around him, the laws of moving mechanics had been murdered.
A jagged shard of black glass, blown outward. Just then, the floor fractured, hung motionless three feet in front of Ren’s nose. It wasn’t resting on a ledge. It was floating in mid-air, frozen at a forty-five-degree tilt. Beside it, droplets of violet star-fire from the reverse-spinning Spindle were suspended like glowing, purple beads of sealing wax, their heat trapped within their tiny spheres. They cast an unnatural, stale glare across the gloom.
The ear-splitting roar of the engine had died. In its place was a horrific, low, deep drone that shook at perhaps three cycles per minute. A rhythmic, deep-sea groan so low that Ren felt it primarily as nausea in his intestines and a cold ache behind his ear drums.
