The black eye in the sky stared down at me for one long, terrible moment, and the cross at its center pulsed once, twice, as if it was taking my measure, weighing the thing I had become against the thing it had been sent to destroy.
Then the eye closed, and collapsed into itself, the black clouds compressing into a single point of absolute black that hung in the air above the camp for a heartbeat before winking out of existence.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard as I came back to myself slowly, the way you surface from deep water, and the first thing I understood was that the body I was surfacing into was not the one I had died in… so many times.
I held my hand up against the grey morning light and did not entirely recognize it. The skin was unmarked and flawless, as though I had just been born anew, a man born from the storms.
