Location:Emberholt Province — the Chamber, Nest Eleven
Date/Time:13 Voidmarch, 9942 AZI — Mid-Morning
Realm:Lower Realm
Yinxin stopped moving, and the nest woke up.
It took under two seconds. The low wet noise that had filled the chamber since they came out of the throat went up half a tone, and then it was not a noise at all — it was inside her skull, and it had not traveled to get there.
The scream hit.
Thousands at once, none of it sound, driving at the seam where her mind held itself shut with the exact quality she had spent four years hoping she had exaggerated in memory.
Memory had been generous.
What had changed was what it landed on. The Thunder Core Ward took the first of it, blue-white geometry locked around the foundation of her cultivation, cast on the rim before dawn and self-sustaining since. Over it the Earth Dragon Ward flexed and breathed and dispersed, and the pressure came through like weather through a hedge, and reached her, and hurt.
