Far from THE Hallowed Verdance, past another obelisk in another valley, the same water lay under the same underlight, and everything else about the place was wrong.
The obelisk itself still shone its blue-gold. It had gone on shining while the men and women who guarded it were killed at its foot, and it was shining now over what had been left there afterward.
They had been laid out!
Two dozen Superpowered Lifeforms in white and blue, arranged in even rows on the pale sand inside the doorway, hands at their sides, faces turned up.
Nobody had done it out of respect. You could see that in the spacing, which was too regular, the spacing of inventory rather than of mourning. Someone had wanted them countable.
Inside the Well itself, more of them drifted.
