Time dilated.
The swamp around him, a festering sprawl of blackwater and mangroves, rippled, then changed.
The air thickened with phantoms.
He saw them now: faint afterimages flickering at the edges of reality.
A Narathi foot soldier collapsing with an arrow through his eye, his death-cry trapped in the mud. A water hag dragging a drowned child into the depths, both their faces twisted in mirrored despair. Centuries of deaths, layered like sediment, each a fossilized tremor of fear or rage.
Damien turned to Hei Tian, the Iron General who'd watched this experiment with arms crossed and eyes unreadable.
The man's aura now burned in Damien's heightened sight.
A column of molten gold fraying at the edges, threads of mortality unraveling with every heartbeat. He could see the general's death, not as prophecy but as a tapestry of possible ends: a sword thrust here, a poisoned cup there, a fall from a horse in ten years or twenty.
Power settled into him, cold and inevitable.
