Blue fire rises from Cassio's shoulders as if someone lit will-o'-the-wisps inside his pauldrons.
It isn't real flame. At least not the kind I know. The air doesn't shimmer with heat, and the stone around his feet doesn't darken—but the light rises from the joints of his breastplate and his shoulders with a liquid glow, deep, almost oceanic. It runs across the platinum-blue plate, slides into the ornamental grooves, and travels down his arms until it meets the spear.
The weapon answers.
The steel leaf opens. The point lengthens, flattens, expands backward into a wide, curved blade adorned with bright ribbing. The shaft thickens at certain points, thins at others, until the entire silhouette stops being a spear and becomes something heavier. More brutal. The shimmer against the stone is clear to me now—a sapphire halberd, imposing and absurd, with a blade shaped like the metallic fin of some creature built to cut open sea.
I'd heard about this on the front.
