For a heartbeat it seemed as if the entire world had been torn from its foundations, as if sky and stone and blood and history fell and mixed together into some invisible abyss.
Panic seized breath and reason alike, and for several terrible moments no man upon the battlements could distinguish earth from thunder or dust from death.
Yet as lungs filled again and pulse abandoned its mad gallop, the truth emerged, narrower in scope than apocalypse yet no less catastrophic in consequence, for what had shattered was not the world entire, but it might as well have been for the people who for weeks so their world confined in four walls.
The murmur of stones breaking apart rolled through the fortress like the long sigh of a dying titan, and the crash of fallen masonry struck the ground, each slab exploding into clouds of powdered age.
Dust surged upwards in a rising column, pale as winter breath, frantic as the arm of a drowning man thrust toward salvation.
