I lay in the silt, staring up at a circle of far-off, furious sky framed by walls of rushing water.
Tenebria hadn't left after all.
She had parted the ocean like a curtain and held it open, a dry shaft of air running all the way down to the seabed where I lay broken. At this depth the weight of the water should have folded in on us and crushed everything flat. Her will, stiffened by Pride, simply wouldn't let it touch her.
She came down slowly through the shaft until her boots settled on the mud of the crater.
She didn't look like a monster. She looked like a general inspecting a bridge that had collapsed a little earlier than planned.
She walked over to me. Her coat hung in strips. The wound on her neck, the one Valeria had died to give her, was still weeping black blood, refusing to close against the last of my Sovereign intent caught in it.
