But the creature didn’t attack. It unfolded —its carapace peeling back like the petals of a rotten lotus. Inside was no flesh, no circuitry. Just a vertical slit of shimmering, oily darkness. A portal to somewhere that had never been part of reality.
Octokuro had stopped rotating its eyes.
From that slit stepped copies . Eight of them. Each a perfect mimic of Vhane himself, but wrong—eyes inverted, mouths sewn shut, movements a half-second behind the real Archon’s will. They drew splinter pistols that hadn’t existed a moment before. octokuro drukhari