Reximus Boneclaw's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

The leak was no longer a leak. By morning the rusted door was gone, and a jagged arch of cracked concrete stood in its place. Orange light pulsed through its fractures like a slow heartbeat. Reximus felt the arch watching him. Worse, he felt it counting his bones. He stepped close with the saber lit. From the seam at the arch's base, a hand pushed up through fallen rubble. Bone fingers tipped with copper joints flexed and reached, not for him, but past him, toward the shelves where his skeletons stood. Something on the other side wanted his army for itself. Reximus drove the red blade down through the wrist. The hand shattered. He pulled lightning up his arm and hurled it into the arch, sealing the cracks with melted stone. The orange glow dimmed to embers. But as he turned away, a lance of light shot from the closing seam and struck his shoulder. Cloth tore. The flesh beneath bloomed into hard pink crystal, jagged and bright, anchored in the wound like a flag planted in claimed ground. He wrapped the shoulder in torn linen. The crystal pulsed in time with the dimmed arch. The breach was shut, for now. But whatever lived past it had marked him, and it knew the way back.