Kael and Seris came through with the controlled urgency of people who had spent twelve hours navigating a path that had tried to kill them and had not entirely succeeded, their formation tight, their weapons present, their attention already scanning before they had fully cleared the threshold. Five of them in total—the Shadow Path complete, all members accounted for, a statistic that represented either exceptional competence or exceptional luck and probably both.
They entered the convergence chamber in time to see the Harvester phase back through the wall.
Not its departure, exactly. Its withdrawal—the creature pulling itself back into solid stone with the same unhurried deliberateness it brought to everything, the black crystal and organic tissue and the silent screaming faces disappearing into the wall's surface without resistance, as though the stone were water and the creature had simply submerged.
