It was a shard.
That was the closest word for it.
Not a stone or a crystal or a fragment of bone. Not a core stripped from something dead. It was a shard—roughly the size of his palm, irregular at the edges as if it had once been part of something larger and had been separated from it by force rather than design. Its surface was dark. Not the kind of dark that absorbed light the way demon essence did. Something different. Something that seemed to exist slightly outside of the color range entirely, shifting at the edges depending on the angle.
It was cold but not temperature-cold.
The kind of cold that had nothing to do with heat.
