Blood was draining away.
Saladin could clearly feel his life force gushing out with every heartbeat, through the cracks in his shattered armor, through wounds torn open by claws, through his broken spine, seeping into the cold, twisted metal beneath him.
His vision began to blur. The sounds of battle grew distant, and a cold numbness spread from his extremities toward his core.
He felt like a traveler trapped in an endless sea of sand, scorched by the sun, his throat cracked and dry, the last trace of moisture about to evaporate.
Darkness, warm darkness, whispered at the edges, tempting him to close his eyes and sink into eternal sleep.
He closed his eyes.
Yet just as his consciousness was about to sink into the abyss...
Something awakened within him.
From the deepest layers of his genes, from the fissures in his soul, it burst forth like a breached dam.
It surged and roared, washing through every inch of flesh and bone on the verge of shattering.
His broken spine crackled under the pull of an invisible force, its severed ends forcibly aligning and knitting together.
An invisible force compressed his shattered breastbone, setting it back into place.
At wounds deep enough to expose bone, flesh writhed and grew at a frenzied, visible pace.
The agony gave way to a burning itch.
And that was not all.
Deep within his consciousness, in Heaven, that realm beyond mortal reach which the Imperium dismissed as delusion, he "heard" a call.
It was as though countless grains of sand were rubbing together, flowing and whispering in the void of his consciousness, resonating with the newborn, restless power within him, urging it onward, guiding it, driving it to erupt.
His sinking consciousness was violently lifted by that power and dragged back into the hell