Amon looked up at it. He did not try to dodge the attack. He did not even raise his sword.
Instead, something moved inside him. Something vast and deep, like a tide pulling back before a wave. The darkness across his body pulsed once. Then it began to move.
The shadow separated from him.
It rose upward from his body in a single enormous mass, expanding as it climbed, spreading outward through the air in every direction like ink dropped into water but moving with terrifying speed and purpose.
It grew and grew, unfurling like the wings of something incomprehensibly large, covering the gray sky in a canopy of pure black darkness.
It swallowed the gray light that was coming from sky covered with gray clouds.
The purple glow from Kazriel's attack cast strange violent light against the edges of the expanding shadow, but the shadow kept growing, kept spreading, until it covered everything above them in a vast dark ceiling that stretched from horizon to horizon.
