Chapter 259: The Man With One Hand
The heavy smell of copper and ozone lingered in Elder Isolde Renwick's private study.
General Hadrian Kest sat on the thick rug. He stared at the small, gray slug resting on the bloody cloth in Draven's hand. The parasite was dead. The agonizing, localized numbness in the back of the General's neck proved it was no longer anchoring into his spine.
Kest did not ask for a painkiller. He did not ask for a Vanguard healer.
He asked the first relevant question, and it was not about his own ruined body.
"How long?" Kest asked quietly, his voice raspy.
Draven looked at the dead Treachery-Fiend. He knew the density of that gray tissue. He had read about the maturation cycle once, in another life, in a story he had assumed was fiction.
"Two years," Draven answered.
