The red eye burning in the cliff face didn't blink.
Devant's verdict kept going around in my head, flat and quiet and impossible to shake.
"She is not trying to kill you."
I stood still on the tilted black beach. My left collarbone throbbed with every shallow breath, the snapped halves of the bone grinding against each other. My spirit well sat at zero, dry and cracked like an old clay bowl. Deep inside my chest, the iron doors of the Soul Sanctum hung warped on their hinges, and I could feel fresh cracks still creeping through the cathedral behind them from the Stage 3 evolution.
I stared up at the slitted pupil swimming in its sea of furious light.
Devant was right. The hostility the living mountain had thrown at my summons, the kind that split bedrock, was gone. The pressure of the Primordial gaze still made the hot air shimmer, but it wasn't aimed like a weapon.
She was just watching me.
