The silence that settled over the infinite silver floor of the Mirror’s Heart was heavy, cold, and total. The bone-shaking thunder of the falling platform had faded. That left only the thin, dry whistling of sub-zero wind blowing across thousands of arm-lengths of polished glass. In the center of that vast, glowing expanse, the Man Who Returned remained motionless, his scuffed cobbler’s boots planted firmly in the pool of black blood that was rapidly crystallizing into dark frost around Berserker Ren’s pinned chest.
The headsman looked down at the dying monster. His broken nose had already ceased to bleed, the silver fluid reabsorbing into the pale flesh of his face like liquid silver drawn back into a tiny blood vessel tube. The jagged cheek wound remained, a dark, half-inch scar that leaked a faint vapor of cold ash. The only physical trophy the brute had managed to tear from four hundred years of deterministic perfection. ‘You fought well, beast,’ the Man Who Returned murmured, his voice lacking all malice, sounding merely like a weary ledger-keeper closing a heavily in unpaid debts account. ‘You were the appetite we could never feed. The hunger that thought it could swallow the world.’
Berserker Ren coughed, a thick bubble of black tar bursting between his giant yellowed fangs. His grip on the headsman’s wrists had weakened, the calloused, soot-stained fingers trembling with the onset of rigor. Yet the amber embers in his hungry eyes refused to dim. He tilted his massive head back. He…
