The one that wasn't a propagation of existing fracture lines but the resolution of the shell's remaining structural integrity into the absence of that integrity.
The sound it made was small and total.
Not the sharp report of something breaking—the quiet, definitive sound of something completing.
The shell separated along every existing fracture simultaneously, every crack that had been developing since the side corridor, every hairline fracture and full split and propagating line of structural compromise reaching its conclusion at the same moment, the pieces falling away from his cloth-wrapped hands in the way of something that had been held together by diminishing material for longer than the material had wanted to be responsible for and had finally, with something that felt almost like relief, completed its function.
