The blast of white light between the ivory awl and the gold-silver metal shard didn’t roar. It whispered, like a thousand dry leases catching fire at the same time in a closed room.
The blast wave cast a ring of violet iron-gall vapor outward across the fractured floor of the Shattered Crucible. Stone flags groaned, their stress-cracks glowing with faint glowing as the spirit weight of two matching men colliding echoed through the foundations of the Seventh Void.
Ren Prime stumbled back three paces, his cobbler’s boots skidding through grey ash. The shaking had traveled up the four-inch mammoth ivory awl directly into his wrist. It sent a sharp, electric numbness through his forearm. The silver metal ring at the awl’s tip was scorched black, but the ivory held. Unbending, dense, and seasoned by hundreds of years of frozen ground.
Behind him, Mira’s crystal-clear right hand caught him firmly between the shoulder blades. Her many-sided smoky quartz fingers were icy cold. But the pure silver deep ring singing in her collarbone sent a stabilizing ripple through Ren’s chest. It quelled the dizziness clawing at his temples, drowning out the sudden, ear-splitting chorus of nineteen conflicting lifetimes crying out in his skull.
