THE Great Usurper drifted silent in his borrowed body, hundreds of Unity-bound Gilded Ones floating dim around him, and for once the being who spread himself through the minds of others had nothing to say through any of them.
And Thalassarch Nereon coiled through the dark in his vast grief-warped immensity, looking at the scattered bubbles and the empty black, and the leviathan recognized what he was seeing with a terrible, complete intimacy. A protector, powerful past reason, floating in the ruins of the thing he had failed to protect. Nereon had lived this exact moment once, alone in a dead ocean, and he had spent ages drowning in it. Watching it happen to the being who had resuscitated his grave, the Drowned Sovereign felt something he had thought long extinct in himself. It was the oldest kind of pity, the kind that came from knowing the road ahead.
THE Creature's obsidian flames billowed with unfathomable coldness.
