It was a quiet kind of destruction the kind that doesn't make a sound because it has already consumed everything that could make noise.
Evelyn lay paralyzed by the realization that her defeat was not merely physical. Her bones were shattered, and her lungs were weeping blood, but those were wounds that could not heal.
This was worse. She had weighed him honestly; she had stripped away every lie and offered the raw, naked truth to the heavens.
And the only result had been to provide him with the blueprint to make an entire world stop listening. She had given him the tools to silence the truth forever.
Far above, in the celestial realm where the laws of cause and effect held sway, the Goddess of Justice did something unprecedented: she withdrew her gaze.
The divine mark on Evelyn's chest flickered and dimmed another degree, fading from a brilliant gold to a sickly, pale amber.
