The first revenant died without understanding why.
One moment it stood among its fellows, bone-marrow form swaying slightly as it processed the pact it had just made with Selena, the blood-marks on her palms still fresh and bleeding. The next moment, lightning struck—not the wild, destructive lightning Dante had been using to burn the Ruined Realm, but something far more focused, far more surgical, far more deliberately cruel.
The bolt entered through the revenant's skull and traveled down its spine, following the pathways of marrow that held its violated consciousness together. For a heartbeat, the revenant's form blazed with internal light, every bone illuminated, every particle of its essence visible. Then it simply came apart, dispersing into ash and fragments and the faintest echo of a scream that might have been relief or might have been terror or might have been both.
