Far from where a Human Dreamer walked with a golden scale in his hand, the silk was being torn.
Nine riders moved through the deep nebulas at a pace that did not belong to this place. The Chrysalis was slow. Everything in it drifted. These did not drift. They drove forward through the falling strands in a wedge, and the strands parted ahead of them and did not settle behind, and the kaleidoscope itself seemed to hold its colors still until they had passed!
They were Descendants, and then, there were these Descendants.
Not the cursed kind with rot at the fissures and salvation begged from a Father who never answered. These were the other thing, the thing the cursed ones had been bred as a shadow of! Each of them stood the height of a small mountain, titanic and ancient, and their bodies were carved of the same substance that Jarl Erling's had been, bronze and stone and old fire, but nothing in them was cracking.
