Her foot touched earth.

The impact registered not as sound or vibration but as fundamental shift in how reality functioned. Gravity hesitated. Time stuttered. The laws governing matter and energy and existence itself paused to acknowledge something that existed before laws, that had written the rules creation followed.

And then rewrote them.

The rift above New Portland—above the entire world—flared with brilliance that should have blinded everyone looking but somehow didn't. Because this ...