>>6115494The man you were talking to is dead.
Most of the men you were talking to are dead.
The slim, sharp line between human and meat has been crossed and they have died in front of you with a surprise grimace on their face, half-way through sentences unsaid, dead with words that will be spoken in their lungs. One of them is crystalline, canteen half raised to his mouth. One is pointing. One was telling a joke. Dead. Dead. Dead.
The field you are in is withered. The cliffs are ravaged, sprouting new crystal ofshoots. It hurt to look at them. Your eyes cannot focus on the spiralling, fractal flowers that has erupted along cliff-face.
In front of you, one of the Coldeyes is blinking. He pats his uniform. He mouths something but he makes no noise and from within the depth of his eyes rainbows shine out and his nails are flaking away into tendrils of smoke.
In front of you, the scraghounds you tasked the men to shoot at and which they did with such lack of aim are dead. Dead. Dead. Except one of them twitches. Shakes. Lets out a high pitched bark, perfect note, rolling across the landscape, resonating with the sudden new crystal growth all around. You have something wondrous. Something unique. Something normally only witnessed so many more miles within the Aikan Desert, the perfection of the Scraghound breeding cycle, the rise of a new life, a *crystalline Wrackhound*, pristine, perfect, fractal and here, looking at you, confused, with eyes that reflect infinity and far, far too early in its strange life to ever comprehend what happened to it, what this is, what the task it *must* complete is. It is a perfect birth. It is a failure. It is a crime on a scale that cannot be described, ruin wrought on such a scale as beggars belief and would bring emperors to desperate tears. It is a joy of such indescripable magnitude that a poet would weep to see it. The worst of all possible crimes have happened here today. The greatest of all possible triumphs have happened here today.
And you cannot understand which it might be.
To your south, you blink, trying to understand the world, the sharp line between the crystaline dead field beneath your boots and the thriving living plantstuff that has been gauged by some force unseen.
There: A dead Windsworn, a man who was bleeding out from a gut-wound he snaps up like with acrobatic vigour. Kips to his feet. Looks at himself. Hands sprawling into some deformed fanglike implement. Crystal in his teeth. Jagged wrackglass across his eyes. And he *screams* and the sound is so enormously loud you fear you might never hear anything again and as you stumble, you realize, no, with horror, no, no!
Your musket is suspended in mid air. Gravity has lost its hold and it is encased in a sprout of crystal. You are *stuck to it* because the crystal growths are across your armor as well.
Only the thick insulation heavy armor has prevented cataclysmic energy seeping into your bones
