Neither of them moved for a long moment.
The golem stood at the far edge of the plain's rock cluster and Damien stood at the altar and the plain between them was quiet in the specific way that the space between two things about to make contact was quiet — not peaceful, not restful, but compressed, the silence of something that had not yet started but had already decided it was going to.
He read the golem again.
Still the same incomplete resolution. The grade present, significant, the weight of it in the ambient field clear enough that he could measure it without difficulty. But the nature beneath the grade remained the thing his read kept reaching for and not finding. Not alive, not dead, not any of the categories his experience with living things and dead things and the various arrangements between them had built in him.
The golem moved first.
