The world did not settle after the rupture.

It strained.

It screamed.

It stretched thin like molten glass, like an over-pulled thread of reality that should have snapped but instead clung stubbornly to existence even as every law it once obeyed dissolved beneath it.

Elaria stood—or thought she did—in the center of a hollow sphere of light so blinding it had no color. Her own breath sounded too loud, as if her lungs were inside a bell. The detonation had torn the merged world open seam by ...