The fine sands within the hourglass continued to flow downward as if they could last for a great while longer. Duncan carefully held the hourglass in his hands while conversing with the ancient "deities."
The gods were rotting—he had heard this statement more than once already. The pontiffs of the Four Gods had told him as much, and they said that the stench of the gods' decay was slowly creeping into the mortal world, eating away at this world alongside the apocalypse.
But this was the first time he had heard such a statement from one of the "gods" themselves and realized that the current situation was the result of their efforts to postpone this process as much as possible.
"This hastily established Shelter is fraught with too many defects... Everything is ephemeral, the curtain, the 'sun,' the keystones of the archipelagos, and we ourselves—before the first long night began, we had already seen our own end."
