The battle lasted close to an hour, although Phei would later discover that reducing what happened beneath the abyss to sixty neat minutes felt almost insulting.
An hour belonged to ordinary life; breakfast, traffic, baths, arguments, naps and whatever other harmless little things people did when existence was not actively trying to pulp them against the walls of an ancient frozen chasm.
Down here, time had become vicious.
Every passing breath arrived beneath enough pressure to make Phei's marrow ache inside his bones, while the Dragon Lady was hurled through glaciers fare another, buried beneath collapsing ice and dragged back into battle so many times that the deepest abyss gradually stopped resembling a cavern and began looking like the aftermath of some old divine calamity.
The two World Transcendents had been right to watch their arrival without concern and with arrogant contempt.
