The silence that hung over the silver plane was heavier than the ocean trenches of the hadal deep. On one knee, the Man Who Returned slowly brought his left hand to his cheek. His calloused, cobbler’s fingers pressed against the fractured bone, coming away coated in the dark, smoking silver fluid of his core essence. He looked at the fluid for a long, quiet moment. His pupil-less mirrored eyes reflected the infinite fractures running through the glass floor beneath him.
‘Four hundred years,’ the Man Who Returned whispered, his voice neither angry nor sorrowful. He carried only the hollow, rustling timbre of dry autumn leaves blowing across an empty courtyard. ‘Four hundred years of burning timelines, un-weaving stars, and burying empires. And it was four boys from a Low-Khorat garret who brought me to the floor.’
The headsman stood up. He didn’t rise with the dramatic fury of a wounded tyrant. He simply straightened his spine. It rolled his shoulders with the quiet, careful deliberation of a workman preparing to demolish an unsafe tenement. But as his boots settled onto the glass, the air inside the Seventh Void changed. The sub-zero chill deepened by twenty degrees. The pale light from the collapsed rows of stone pillars died entirely. That left the chamber lit up only by the radiant, blinding silver fire that began to pour from the headsman’s eyes, nostrils, and cracked cheek.
