The silence that settled over the Inner Sanctum was not the peaceful stillness of an empty room. It was the choking empty pocket that followed a headsman’s axe—the second between the blade’s whistle and the wet thump upon the block.
Ren Vale remained on one knee on the semi-clear silver glass, his left hand clutched tightly in Mira’s warm mortal fingers. Meanwhile, her cold, many-sided quartz palm remained anchored over his breastbone. His chest rose and fell in shallow, jagged gasps that tasted of crushed slate and bitter gum arabic. Beneath his lambskin keeper’s apron, his ribs throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache. The lingering body toll of Berserker Ren’s entropic consumption from the finale of the Un-Burning War, which had left his belly screaming with phantom starvation.
He reached into his leather satchel with trembling, ink-stained fingers. He pulled out a pinch of prepared potion-made willow-ash. He pressed the dry, powdery carbon under his tongue. He was followed by a swallow of packed salt water from his brass canteen. The skin-burning salt water burned his throat, and the ash coated his teeth in bitter grit. But it was the only sustenance his mutated spirit veins could digest. Without it, the eighteen exclusion penalties active in his marrow would tear his focus to ribbons.
