The man who came out of the tower did not hurry.
He was ordinary to look at: medium height, a lined face, grey at the temples. He wore the high-collared crimson robe of the Red Chalice's upper ranks, and the hem was dry and clean, as if he had walked through the fighting without letting it touch him. In his right hand he carried a long, curved sword that looked cut from a piece of shadow. Miasma came off the blade in slow, oily waves.
What stopped Ren was the man's power.
It was two things at once and neither of them liked the other. Underneath was ordinary mana, refined and strong, the kind a mage builds over a long life of hard work; it sat at the edge of Radiant. Wound through it, packed into it, was miasma, the thick black stuff of the Abyss. The two churned against each other inside him like oil and water forced into one jar. It should have torn him apart. Instead it made him huge.
