The air didn’t scream when the cleaver fell. The air simply ceased to exist along the path of the blade.
Berserker Ren stood six and a half feet tall atop the crumpled gold-silver metal carriage, his bare heels sunk into the crushed metal like bronze wedges. His muscles, engorged with the swallowed mass of four hundred years of un-born time, strained against his charred skin until the white steam venting from his pores whistled like a dying boiler. Across his chest and shoulders, the glowing fissures pulsed with savage orange light, lighting up the four-foot slab of pig iron raised high above his right ear.
The notched butcher’s cleaver was no longer a tool of the slaughterhouse. Heated to incandescence by the entropic gorge, the iron glowed cherry-red from socket to tip, the seizure runes etched into its spine hissing. They burned the surrounding ozone out of the air.
Below the blade, perched upon his buckled brass pulpit, Arch-Heresiarch Malakor didn’t run.
The old man had dropped his gold-silver metal tuning fork. The instrument lay in the soot between his boots, its tines twisted and dead. His brass breathing mask dangled from a single leather strap against his collar. That left his withered mouth exposed to the rotten-egg drafts of the volcano bowl. His milky eyes, magnified by his askew goggles, stared up into the glowing edge of the cleaver with the vacant, blank grief of a man whose god had turned out to be an empty well.
