The silence that followed the extinction of the nineteen summons was unlike any quiet Ren Vale had ever known. It wasn’t the restful stillness of a library after the lamps had been doused, nor was it the heavy, expectant pause between lightning and thunder. It was the negative pressure of an ontological empty pocket. The sound of an entire universe step by step sealing the hole where a human life had been torn away.
Across the vast, horizonless silver expanse of the Mirror’s Heart, the Man Who Returned stood motionless, his scuffed cobbler’s boots resting upon the dormant glass. The silver fluid had dried along his shattered cheekbone. That left a dull, matte grey scar that looked like a seam in unpolished pewter. The gold-silver metal shard-blade hung loosely at his side. Its razor tip pointed toward the dormant silhouettes resting in the depths below. For the first time since the siege of the Mirror’s Heart began, the headsman was not advancing. He simply looked at Ren Prime with eyes that held the impossible to understand. It crushed weight of four hundred years of solitude.
Ren struggled to remain upright. Without the royal stance of Lord Ren or the scrappy physical grit of Cinder, his nineteen-year-old body felt desperately light, hollowed out by the total toll of nineteen piled up exclusion penalties. He looked down at his trembling left hand.
