He was three blocks from the main complex when he stopped walking and looked at the ring.
It sat on his finger with the particular quality of something that had always been there, which was unsettling given that he'd owned it for approximately twenty minutes. The warmth hadn't faded. It pulsed at irregular intervals with a rhythm that didn't map to anything biological or mechanical that he could identify, and each pulse produced a faint response from the Hollow Hound, a brief answering beat, the two things in conversation in a register he couldn't access.
'Pre-system,' he thought, walking. 'Made before the system existed. Which means made before the Fractures, before the Awakened, before any of the infrastructure that the last twenty years had built on top of whatever came before it.'
H
