The silence after the Gate sealed was the loudest thing Marius Arass had ever heard.
It was not the absence of sound ...the wind still whispered across the ridgeline, the griffons still stamped and clicked their beaks, the distant creak of stressed stone still echoed from the scarred valley below. It was the absence of something deeper: the dimensional pressure that had been building for days, the constant cold weight of the Abyss pressing against reality's fabric, the subsonic hum that had vibrated through every nerve since the breach opened. All of it, gone. Replaced by ordinary silence. The kind of silence that existed in a world that was, against all probability, still here.
Marius carried Aliyah Winters down the two hundred feet of spiral stairway with the careful deliberation of a man handling something more precious than his own life.
