'She got what she wanted.'
The thought held its shape in the center of the ruin for a long moment. Clean. Exact. The assessment of a physician who had been used as a surgical instrument.
He exhaled.
Not a sigh. Not anger. The specific, controlled exhale of a man who has processed something fully and is giving his body one second to acknowledge it before moving on to the next item.
He was naked. In the center of a Primordial Rune battlefield. Alone.
The morning air was clean and cold and the ruins glowed faintly with the residual warmth of a bloodline event that had been ten thousand years in preparation and had taken approximately four hours to execute.
'What a hassle,' he said, to no one.
He reached up and ruffled his hair once—the gesture that stood in for several things he would not say out loud—and let his hand fall back to his side.
He stood there.
