The deepest domain of THE Ghor-VazHAL no longer had a floor.
The lakes of blood had been thrown out of their beds. The tower-arteries lay snapped and draining across miles of churned meat and shattered stone, and the vaulted dark above had been torn open in long strips through which the veins of the deeper structure hung loose and dripping, and through all of it drifted the debris of a battle between two things that did not know how to stop!
On one side of the ruin, THE Creature breathed heavily.
He was carrying unfathomably heavy wounds. His obsidian frame had been opened from shoulder to hip, his body nearly split in half along a diagonal of ruin, held together by weavings of white-gold and black that knitted with terrible slowness, and one arm hung wrong, and his breath came in long dragging pulls, each one a payment he counted out and made!
And on the other end of the ruin lay the Primeval One.
