The threads did not drag Valen Ashbluff through the seam. They carried him, the way a current carries something that has stopped swimming.
One moment there was the command room: Arthur's face turning, Kali's hand on her blade, the maps still glowing on the table. The next, there was nothing under his feet at all. Sound went first. Then weight. Then his sense of direction, which he had never in his life thought of as something that could be taken away.
When the world came back, it was the wrong world.
He stood on a floor that was not a floor, pale and faintly luminous, like frost on black glass. Above him the sky held the deep violet of the minutes after sunset and stayed that way, as though someone had stopped the clock there because they liked the colour. Crimson threads ran through the air in every direction, slow and alive, pulsing like veins under thin skin. There were no walls. He felt enclosed all the same.
She was sitting on nothing a few paces away, ankles crossed.
