The silence after the voice didn't break. It curdled, thickening into something with actual weight, the kind of quiet where a man starts counting his own heartbeats to prove the world hasn't stopped along with his ears. The question sat over the Spire the way smoke sits over a battlefield after the shouting stops — not gone, just waiting to be breathed in by whoever moved first.
Zereth moved first. "Off the platform. All of you, now." His voice had none of the flatness I'd learned to read as calm; this was a different flatness, the kind a soldier wears when he's already decided panic is a luxury the next hour can't afford. "Whatever that thing wants an answer to, I'd rather it not get one out of us standing directly under it."
