The ceiling didn’t merely crumble. It caved inward as if struck by an iron anchor dropped from the clouds.
A six-foot slab of glass-fused dark rock smashed through the copper steam lines, showering the vault in scalding water, sulfur dust, and spinning fragments of stonework. Through the boiling breach plunged Berserker Ren.
The giant landed on both feet between Ren Vale and the Arch-Heresiarch. He drove the flat stone slabs downward six inches with a blast wave that knocked Scribe Ren flat onto his back.
Malakor’s white-gold beam of Causal Reversal didn’t halt.
The lance of packed anti-breakdown, burning with the pressure of un-born thousand years, struck the dropping giant directly in the chest. It seized the Berserker’s boiled-leather tunic, rewinding the charred hide back into raw cowhide, then into the living hair of an un-slaughtered steer. The thick scar tissue across his collarbone began to soften, threatening to rewind thirty years of starvation into the tender skin of a boy who had never known the fire.
The Berserker didn’t raise his notched cleaver to block.
He lowered his head, planted his chimney-wrapped feet into the cracked stone, and opened his jaws wide.
A wet, grinding roar ripped from his throat—the sound of two earth-shaking plates scraping together over underground fire. He lunged forward, caught the white-gold beam between his back teeth. Then he bit down with all the crushing leverage of his jaw.
