His obsidian flames guttered low and ragged around a frame that had taken real damage. The Blank Caudal dragged behind him through the ochre dust, white hair matted dark, and along his left side ran a wound that had gone all the way to something structural, a splitting seam where one of the Cenozoic ones had gotten an Intent into him before dying badly for the privilege.
Calcified stones lay in ridges across the whole broken domain. The air was thick with the released corpses of nine ruptured Gu, ages of stolen bearing hanging in the red light with nowhere left to go, and beneath his feet the strata ran down through crushed pyramid stone and petrified bone into layers of older ruin still!
He breathed!
And behind his ribs, and behind him, and somehow also very far away, the statue spoke.
|Two hundred and six.|
