The first sensation was not the biting frost of the Northern Reaches, nor was it the heavy, copper-scented weight of my own exhaustion. It was the absence of everything. There was no ground to anchor my heels, no wind to pull at my hair, and no gravity to remind my bones that they belonged to the earth.
I was suspended.
It was a quality of being held without hands, pinned in a medium that had no name and no resistance. When my eyes finally flickered open, they didn't find the gray, overcast sky of Nevareth. They found a void. It was dark, yet it wasn't empty; it possessed the terrifying, infinite depth of the space between stars, scattered with distant, lonely points of light that seemed to have been cast there by a careless hand.
