Strax braced his hand on the glassy crater floor and tried to stand, feeling the weight of his own body as if the world had increased gravity just for him. His muscles responded, slowly but obediently.
Air entered his burned lungs with difficulty, and for a brief second he believed he had survived only with severe physical damage, something his body had faced before.
However, when he forced his right foot against the ground to stand up completely, something strange happened: there was no pain, no crack, no tearing of flesh—there was lightness.
A wrong lightness.
He lowered his eyes and saw that the surface of his own foot was disintegrating into gray particles, like ash blown by an invisible breeze. There was no blood, no exposed tissue, only fragmentation. The edge of the boot simply dissolved along with what should have been inside it. The sensation was not of loss, but of progressive absence, as if parts of him were ceasing to belong to matter.
