The Cradle of First Flames rose.
It happened slowly at first, the way massive things always moved when they began moving for the first time, with the deliberate patience of weight remembering that it had options beyond stillness.
The earth at the edges of the domain separated from the surrounding Threshold Lands in a line that ran clean and precise, dozens of miles of transformed paradise detaching from the world it had been part of since the world began. Where the separation occurred, the underside of the Cradle was exposed to open air for the first time, and what that underside revealed made the sky beneath the rising land look like something from the oldest stories.
