Michael felt ground beneath his boots again.
The twisting sensation stopped abruptly, leaving a brief moment of weightlessness before gravity settled into place.
Darkness surrounded them.
Not absolute darkness.
A deep, endless twilight.
The world they stepped into was vast and open, yet there was no visible sky. Instead, an immense black canopy stretched overhead like a ceiling lost in shadow. Faint currents of pale light moved across it like distant, silent storms.
Then the crystals began to glow.
Softly at first.
Scattered across the terrain were clusters of crystalline growths that pulsed with dim blue and violet light. They rose from the ground like strange, transparent plants, some shaped like jagged grass blades, others like crooked trees made of glass.
The ground beneath their feet was not soil.
