The lead box, once used to hold something, was now empty.
Cold sweat ran down the bridge of Kup's nose. With difficulty, he forced his jaw open, trying to spit out the words hovering at his lips, but no sound came.
The words that had yet to be spoken lacked a certain keyword. It had been taken away.
Or it had escaped.
Something was missing from the room, yet something also seemed to have appeared. An inexplicable tension filled the air, as though space itself had been squeezed aside, and an entire stretch of existence had slipped into the cracks, prowling along the subtle divide between subjective perception and objective reality.
But it was too close, and far too massive. It inevitably pressed against its surroundings, sending out ripples of unease—like a reptile tunneling beneath wallpaper, its supple, lengthy body winding forward, lifting the skin of reality into swelling undulations.
It moved unimpeded through the cramped room, caught between existence and nonexistence.
For those not sensitive enough, that subtle sense of contradiction was almost impossible to detect. Brother Canser, who had only just entered, had not even realized something was wrong. His gaze was still sweeping the floor, perhaps thinking some valuable item had rolled away and been lost.
Kup lunged to the table and seized the arrowhead, then returned to the operating table. With an agile yet slightly comical twist of his body, he avoided the opened Instrument Kit and the sterilized area.
The conditioned reflexes forged by training made his body complete the sequence almost automatically, while most of his thoughts were occupied with searching for what had been lost.
The result terrified him. Information that should have lain sedimented like a skeletal specimen had grown living flesh and blood, left its place behind, and vanished down a