Alex let his eyes move across the crowd one final time. Then he turned toward Venedikt and gave a single nod, and the darkness came, rising from the floor around him like something alive, wrapping him in its pitch embrace, swallowing him completely before falling away just as swiftly, collapsing back to the ground and vanishing without a trace, as though it had simply never existed.
He was gone, and with Alex gone, the grip on their minds was released.
It happened all at once. The clarity that had been imposed on them, the enforced sharpness that had held their emotions at arm's length and allowed them only to listen, simply lifted. And everything it had been holding back came rushing in to fill the space it left, the way water rushed into a depression the moment the hand was removed.
The three choices he had offered became the center of it, and around them, every consequence began to take shape.
