Page 80 of Stars in Aura

Brooding.

Thinking of the one woman who defied reason, wielded forces he couldn’t explain, and made his mind unravel in ways he didn’t like.

How in the void was he supposed to deal with all of her?

The answer, he suspected, would come with consequences.

An hour passed.

The night was still, the atmosphere torrid with heat and the lingering scent of spiced rum.

Ki’Remi remained stretched out on the long couch, a glass half-drained at his side.

He stared at the expanse of Eden II’s twin moons until his eyes fluttered shut.

His consciousness slipped between wakefulness and slumber, breath hitching as his inner eye searched the skies.

The stars above him flickered, not with light, but with movement.

The constellations warped, twisted, and bent inward until the darkness itself began to take form.

The air shattered.

A storm of power exploded from his chest, rippling outward like the shockwave of an unseen detonation.

The walls rattled.

The floor groaned.

The fabric of the space around him distorted, bending to an energy far beyond temporal control.

His body wasn’t his anymore.

Not just morphing, not just shifting, but unraveling.

Multiplying.

He ceased to be mortal.

His skin darkened, the rich obsidian hue bleeding into an antediluvian shade belonging to the first sun-forged warriors of the Ameru.

His muscles stretched, his build towering higher, his frame thickening into something more than just Ki’Remi.

A form peeled from his frame.

Then another.

Then another.

Seconds later, the Witchmen stood around him, their shapes flickering in and out of the physical realm, neither here nor gone, neither alive nor dead.

They were him.

He was them.

Their voices, deep, raw, ancient, slithered through the thick, humid air.

‘You cannot escape us for too long, child of the Ameru.’

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