"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 25 - Torian Pearls." - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

He'd covered perhaps ten feet when the light above him was suddenly blotted out. He had a tiny part of
a second to realize that this was some sort of end, if not the end of everything. Then a slab of stone the
size of a small office building landed on him.

In that moment he knew pain that swept away all other sensations, all thoughts, all awareness even of his
own body. Then the pain faded, and he knew that he was not dead-at least not except in this strange
world he'd just left. He was aware of every separate molecule of his body, hurtling away on its own path
into an immense chill dark emptiness. This awareness lasted long enough for relief to fill his mind, relief
that he'd survived one more monstrous twisting of the laws of nature in the nightmare world between the
Dimensions.

Then both relief and awareness vanished, and everything was blackness and the terrible cold void where
his molecules darted about like meteors.

Chapter 3

Slowly Blade realized that his molecules no longer darted about in the great dark void. He felt them
slowly assembling themselves into the body and mind he knew so well. Then slowly that mind and body
began to be aware of more than the void.

His head throbbed as if it really had been crushed and then roughly put back together. Every throb
seemed to send a wave of pain through the rest of his body, so that all his bones seemed to shake in
rhythm with the pounding in his head.

He lay still and let other sensations join the headache. Wetness was under him and all around him,
except for his face. Some of it was a sticky, clinging wetness, like thick mud. Some of it felt more like
warm muddy water.

All of the wetness smelled strongly of decaying vegetation. The warm air that blew over Blade's face
smelled even more strongly and far more unpleasantly of dead animals, the foul scum on stagnant ponds,
methane oozing from the black depths of swamps, a faint hint of sulphur.

Blade cautiously opened his eyes and sat up, ignoring the pain in his head. He sat motionless, bracing
himself with his arms, until the pain in his head faded. Then he surveyed what lay around him.

He sat near the top of a half-submerged slope of black mud and dead, yellowing grass. His legs were
submerged. The mud under him sucked and squelched unpleasantly every time he moved. Slowly he got
his legs under him and started to rise. For a moment he had the unpleasant feeling that the mud would
grip him and hold him here, as he'd been held in the chair under the falling cliff. Then the grip of the mud
broke and he stood up.

All around him was a broad expanse of water, broken here and there by hillocks like the one he was on
or by dead and dying trees. The surface of the water shimmered as if it had been polished. A closer look
showed Blade that the water was dark with mud and spotted with floating bits and pieces. Blade saw
dead animals, patches of dead leaves, floating bits of wood too straight to be natural, but nothing alive.
He began to feel that he was looking out over a land just emerging from the waters of a universal flood-or
perhaps slowly vanishing under those waters. Everywhere he looked, Blade could see no land rising
more than a foot or two above the gently lapping water.