Vessel, Book I: The Advent
Page 51
There is positively no doubt that he came to me from another direction. The loose motorcade of mismatched vehicles, unimpressive and inconspicuous except for their darkly tinted windows, simply could not have come within five miles of that lonesome parking lot without incident. Serious incident. That Wal-Mart doesn't know how lucky it is to still be standing.
He wasn't in the area by chance, though; this was no mere coincidence. He had been following―far behind the tour bus, far behind the U-Haul brigade and the hunters' many ambulances. Way behind.
He stayed behind because he wanted to know more. He wanted to wait awhile, to draw his answers from a number of sources and senses. From the unconsumed blood spilled by those Hollow groupies, from the shock of their unprecedented deaths, from the collective thoughts of his U-Haul posse. And with these gleaned references, he patiently pieced together small fractions of the Vessel―what they were capable of, what might hurt them, what defenses they had, and who they knew.
He still wanted to know more. So the motorcade steered clear.
They will seek death's origin together.
He wanted to know more in order to make it count; in order to make it hurt. He wanted to swallow any fact he could sink his teeth into. The rest of it could wait. He had forever, after all.
As it will in turn seek them.
The nature of the divine is strange. To the divine, the action is nothing, and the meaning is everything. The action is merely a symbol, something palpable to make sense of the meaning behind it. This explains how Khan himself can ignite without the clothes burning off his back, or how water rushes uphill to exalt at Corin's feet. How that 13-ton tour bus floated like a feather on frozen air.
It also explains why Dahrkren decided to carve out my heart and eat it.