The abandoned Arass manor erupted at three hours past midnight.
No one was there to witness it directly. The nearest occupied building was a boarding house two hundred yards south, whose residents were woken by a sound that none of them could adequately describe afterward. It was not an explosion, though it shared some qualities with one ...the sudden, violent release of energy, the shockwave that rattled windows and knocked loose tiles from rooftops. It was not an earthquake, though the ground shook hard enough to topple furniture and crack plaster. It was something else. Something that the witnesses described in terms that revealed more about their own fears than about the event itself.
"Like the ground screaming," one tenant told the city watch the following morning.
"Like something being born that shouldn't exist," said another.
