The women looked up and marveled at their lover who looked otherworldly in this moment.
Quinlan floated cross-legged a meter above the moss with [Soul Reaper] turning slow at the level of his folded knee, point down, the dark blade carrying ghost-pale flame along its edge.
Crimson script wrote itself across his throat and his collarbones in a language none of them could read, and a second pattern was layering itself in the air around his shoulders at a frequency only the rite could hear. His sleeve had pulled back along the inside of his forearm, baring the wrist [Soul Reaper] had cut on his command, and the thread of dark crimson he had bled was still rising into the cloud above his cross-legged float.
He bled patiently, without pain on his face, the way the sky bleeds into a sunset, unhurried and enormous.
