Chapter 9: Seraveth Makes Elian an Offer He Should Refuse

The round ended the way most terrible things ended: not with ceremony but with simple cessation.

The dissolution column at the necropolis center slowed its patient rising, then stopped, then reversed, drawing inward in a long, breathing contraction that pulled the particulate cloud back into the stone the way water pulls back from a shore. The architecture did not reassemble. It simply became less absent, the empty spaces filling with a gray-white stillness that was not quite solid and not quite nothing. The temperature dropped four degrees in under a minute. Elian noted this with the part of his mind that noted everything and filed it without comment, because the more immediate requirement was that he was bleeding from his left forearm where one of the dissolution creatures had caught him mid-deflection, and the blood was the ordinary red kind, which was worth confirming.

He pressed his right hand against the wound and held it there. The creature had not dissolved his arm. He had not dissolved his arm. These were the relevant facts.