There were scores now, all emerging from what seemed a single point in the inky depths. Each one displaying a unique posture; some so battered as to be little more than a host of fragments and shards, others entirely unmarred. Sailing out of the blackness. An army.

Yet unarmed. Naked, seemingly sexless. There was a perfection to them – their proportions, their flawless surfaces – that suggested to the ex-priest that the giants could never have been alive. They were constructs, statues in truth, though no two were alike in posture or expression.

Bemused, he watched them spin past. It occurred to him that he could turn, to see if they simply dwindled down to another point far behind him, as if he but lay alongside an eternal river of green stone.

His own motion was effortless.

As he swung round, he saw—

—and cried out.

A cry that made no sound.

A vast – impossibly vast – red-limned wound cut across the blackness, suppurating flames along its ragged edges. Grey storms of chaos spiralled out in lancing tendrils.

And the giants descended into its maw. One after another. To vanish. Revelation filled his mind.

Thus, the Crippled God was brought down to our world. Through this . . . this terrible puncture. And these giants . . . follow. Like an army behind its commander.

Or an army in pursuit.

Were all of the jade giants appearing somewhere in his own realm? That seemed impossible. They would be present in countless locations, if that was the case. Present, and inescapably visible. No, the wound was enormous, the giants diminishing into specks before reaching its waiting oblivion. A wound such as that could swallow thousands of worlds. Tens, hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps all he witnessed here was but hallucination, the creation of a hen’bara-induced fever.

Yet the clarity was almost painful, the vision so brutally ... strange ... that he believed it to be true, or at the very least the product of what his mind could comprehend, could give shape to – statues and wounds, storms and bleeding, an eternal sea of stars and worlds ...

A moment’s concentration and he was turning about once more. To face that endless progression.

And then he was moving towards the nearest giant.

It was naught but torso and head, its limbs shorn off and spinning in its wake.

The mass burgeoned swiftly before him, too fast, too huge. Sudden panic gripped Heboric. He could see into that body, as if the world within the jade was scaled to his own. The evidence of that was terrible – and horrifying.

Figures. Bodies like his own. Humans, thousands upon thousands, all trapped within the statue. Trapped ... and screaming, their faces twisted in terror.

A multitude of those faces suddenly swung to him. Mouths opened in silent cries – of warning, or hunger, or fear – there was no way to tell. If they screamed, no sound reached him.