Interlude
A mid the carnage, a cloudy patch of mist materialized and transformed into the shape of a gray-cloaked man.
Neither shadow nor fully solid, he picked his way around the dead to the corpse of Salvistar.
Much of the stallion’s life’s blood had left him, but some power remained.
The entity knelt beside him and felt around the wound the wraith had made.
The powerful sword had cut deep into Salvistar’s chest, allowing the entity to reach into it elbow deep.
A god-being was not made of the same stuff as mortals or even Eletians.
They were made of energies beyond the ken of any Earthly being, and yet, as the entity groped within the stallion’s chest cavity, he felt bone and tissue and organ just like the innards of an ordinary horse—slippery, wet, fibrous, hard.
When the god-being descended to Earth, the entity thought, its energies manifested a form akin to what existed on the Earthly plane.
When the entity found what he sought, he knew he had captured the power of the gods. When he withdrew it from the corpse, the great stallion’s form evanesced in a sparkling vapor that streamed out the broken window.
The gray entity, with his prize pulsing in his hands, smiled in triumph. All he needed now was the avatar.