The First Horizon was breaking.
It was not the kind of breaking that announced itself with drama and spectacle, though drama and spectacle were certainly present in abundance. It was the kind of breaking that happened in the bones of things — in the foundational architecture of law and constraint and carefully maintained impossibility that had held the prison together since the Collapse Wars ended and someone had decided that imprisoning the Judge of Origin was preferable to the alternative. The ancient chains that had endured through the entire subsequent history of existence — chains forged from the combined authority of five supreme paths, chains that had never been tested seriously because no force had ever been serious enough to test them — were shattering now. One by one, then in clusters, then in cascades, each fracture sending tremors outward through dimensions that had no name, through realities that had no map.
