It wasn't hard to notice the odd movement in the sleeve. It pulsed rhythmically, looking especially out of place against the emaciated body wrapped in the black robe.
Kraft thrust his sword forward, aiming for roughly where the palm should be. To his surprise, the blade went straight through.
This wasn't normal. The skin and muscle that should have covered the bones had vanished, replaced by a substance that offered almost no resistance. It flowed slowly around the tip of the blade, sending back faint vibrations like biting, grinding, twisting, and clinging.
He stopped Green from pouring oil over it, then twisted the blade and cut lengthwise up the entire sleeve to the armpit of the robe.
The body had unquestionably died, though even Kraft couldn't immediately determine exactly when. It was in a strange state, almost as if it had been dried in the shade. The moisture-rich fat had separated, and its thin, withered muscle bundles clung to the surface of an upper-arm skeleton whose left arm had four bends. The skin had contracted into vertical wrinkles.
Yet the clear texture and pores remained, preserved as vividly as they had been at the moment life slipped away.
The palm, however, was the exact opposite, as though all the life that had drained away had gathered there, concentrated to the point of near saturation, melting skin and bone.
The boundaries between the tissues had blurred, reverting to a poorly differentiated state. Their fetal-heartbeat-like pulsation created the rising and falling beneath the sleeve they had seen.
The five slender fingers had melted and spread out, fused together like webbing. They flowed like near-boiling paste on an iron griddle, filling the slit that had just been cut.
Several hard objects of various sizes rose amid the churning biological matter. They were ghastly