"Kael…"
The whisper wasn't an echo.
It was her.
Raw. Strained. Fading.
Kael didn't hesitate.
He lunged for the crack in the air just as it began to seal, silver light exploding from his body as he forced his way into the thinning fracture, reality itself protesting his intrusion.
"Stop!" Adrian snapped, reaching for him.
Too late.
The world ripped sideways.
Kael landed hard on obsidian ground that wasn't ground at all.
It shifted beneath him like living glass, reflecting a sky with no stars, only spiraling constellations that moved too deliberately, too purposefully to be natural. They looked like eyes. Thousands of them. All watching.
There was no moon here.
No wind.
No scent.
Just pressure.
Immense and suffocating, like being at the bottom of an ocean that had never known water.
"Luna!" he roared, pushing himself up.
His voice didn't echo.
It was absorbed by the space itself, swallowed before it could travel.
