In the command room, the script writing itself above Quinlan's heart kept on going.
The Abyssal Genesis Physique had dragged the unfinished slot back into his chest and started authoring on it. The blood from the ring drove up through the band in a sustained crimson feed and emptied itself into the work. A thousand liters of dwarven kin poured along his arm, vanished beneath his pauldron, and converged at the hollow above his heart, where the demonic mouthful in his marrow rose to meet it.
Then something else arrived.
'Hmm?' Quinlan felt it through the work, faint, foreign, and warm, brushing the place the script was being authored the way a hand brushes a forehead.
He did not recognize its origin. It was not from his physique, not from any of his women, not from Nyxara, not from the system's protocols. It was small and far away and not asking for his attention. He had no time to mark where it had come from before his body had already moved toward it.
