The light did not explode.

It claimed.

It rose like a living thing — a pillar of brilliance that felt less like illumination and more like revelation, a wound in the world tearing itself wider to let something ancient breathe again. The web beneath Elaria surged into it, threads snapping upward and weaving themselves around her limbs, her throat, her ribs. It wasn’t binding her.

It was absorbing her.

She couldn’t scream. The light swallowed sound first, then sensation, then the notion ...