Selena had climbed perhaps halfway up the staircase toward the altar when the child appeared.
Not gradually, not with warning or announcement, but simply manifesting between one step and the next as if he had always been there and she was only now noticing him. He sat on the stairs perhaps twenty feet above her, small and somehow perfect despite—or perhaps because of—the wrongness of his existence.
He looked perhaps seven or eight years old, though age was a strange concept to apply to something that had clearly never been born in any normal sense. His form was mostly solid, more substantial than the revenants but carrying within it the same bone-marrow composition, the same fundamental wrongness of beings assembled from what should have been dispersed. But where the revenants were corrupted, twisted, obviously violated—this child was beautiful.
