The black bone-black dust didn’t blind the Man Who Returned for long.
A man who had survived nineteen world-ending timelines didn’t rely on physical corneas to find his mark. Through the stinging cloud of calcined sheep bone and alum, the older Ren tracked the living heat of Ren Prime’s lungs, the wet thrum of his nineteen-year-old pulse, and the clear metal reek of the dark oak-ink drying on his leather apron.
With a ragged, bestial snarl, the Man Who Returned shook his head. It whipped his coat collar to clear the dust, and slashed horizontally with the gold-silver metal shard.
The eight-inch blade whistled through the freezing air like a scythe through dry grass. The edge cut through the empty space where Ren Prime had been standing half a heartbeat before, slicing cleanly through one of the four-by-four spruce poles that held the sheepskin windbreak. The heavy timber cut without pushback, falling with a dull thump into the snow.
Ren Prime rolled beneath the swing, his palms catching the slush, his knees scraping against the rough hard speckled rock flags. He came up behind the central drafting stone base, his breath rasping like a rusty saw in his bruised chest.
