The rift looked like someone had taken a knife to reality and left the wound to fester.
We'd driven out before dawn, me, Azryth, Mara, and Henrik, in a beat-up SUV that handled the backroads like it had a personal grudge against suspension systems. The rift was in a clearing about thirty miles from the safehouse, hidden enough that civilians wouldn't stumble across it but not so remote that we couldn't evacuate if things went catastrophically wrong.
Which, given my track record, felt like a real possibility.
"There," Mara said, pointing.
I saw it immediately. A tear in the air, maybe six feet tall and two feet wide, hovering about three feet off the ground. It pulsed with a sickly purple-black light, and the air around it looked wrong and distorted, like looking through warped glass.
"That's a minor rift?" I asked.
