She didn't give me a breath to get used to it.
Alyssara threw her arms wide, and her Complete Control went off like a struck bell. The sanctum didn't crack. It folded away. Walls, floor and ceiling turned over like cards and were gone, and in their place she unrolled the inside of herself: a sky of crimson nebulae and black stars, slow and enormous, turning on an axis only she could feel. Below us, where a floor should have been, an ocean of pale spectral hands rose and fell like surf. Every one of them whispered. Every one of them was real.
'She isn't warping the room any more,' I thought. 'She's replaced it. This is her. Her domain, given a shape.'
The ocean surged up to take me.
I didn't fly away from it. I wrote under my own boots. Grey for ink, Harmony for grammar, one plain sentence: 'I am standing on solid ground.'
