Rex smiled, and I noticed that the insides of his throat were black, as if all of his internal organs had been fried, which may not be far from the truth.
Only the unreasonable vitality of a mage kept him alive, and he tried to move, to push himself up, but his arm gave way, and he fell back against the stone, gasping.
"I can't... I can't walk."
I rolled my eyes inside my head. Of course, you can't walk; it would be strange to do so without legs. Oh, maybe he was thinking of crawling.
A thought like this would have horrified me before, but I had died too much to overly care about this sort of thing very much.
I reached down and picked him up. He weighed almost nothing, his body was failing, the flesh wasting away in front of my eyes, and his bones light as a bird's. I cradled him against my chest, his head lolling against my shoulder, and I felt his heart stutter.
