A ten-foot-wide bridge of thick cyan glacial ice erupted from the blade, freezing a solid road across the empty air between two plummeting shelves of stone.
We hit the ice at a dead sprint. The falling lower layers screamed like grinding continents, and the noise came straight up through the soles of my boots. Behind us, the Precipice was amputating its own wounded geography, dumping thousands of tons of dead basalt into the pitch-black abyss.
We cleared the final gap and hit solid rock just as Brunhilde's highway shattered into cyan powder over the void.
I stopped, gasping, my hands on my knees, and looked up.
We had reached a perfectly level plateau of obsidian bedrock. It stretched out into the dark like a polished anvil, so flat and clean that my boots squeaked on it. The falling soot cleared, swept away by a sudden freezing draft that carried no scent of decay. It smelled of nothing at all.
Waiting for us on the open stone was the janitor.
