The shadow met his hand before he reached it, closing the last foot of distance on its own, and for a moment that stretched far longer than it should have, Rekh'Naar simply stood there with his palm open beneath something that had no business existing, watching it settle into his grip like it remembered the shape of his hand from somewhere neither of us had been present for.
It was smaller than I'd expected. A shard, dark and faintly translucent, no bigger than a closed fist, its edges too regular to be a natural break and too rough to be cut — the look of something that had once been whole and had been torn rather than shaped into its current fragment, and the moment the torchlight caught it fully, I understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with reasoning it out, that I had seen its like before.
"Krix," I said.
