The agent's whistle was a needle of sound in the sudden, thick quiet. It was a sound of order in a landscape of pure chaos, a signal that the rules, however battered, had not yet been completely broken.
The agent, his professional training warring with the primal terror in his eyes, took one last look at Ravi, at the impossible, humming tear in the world, and then he vanished into the dust cloud, a messenger carrying an unthinkable truth back to his mistress.
Run. The voice in his head was Lyssara's, was his own, was a lifetime of cowardice screaming at him to survive. Flee. Disappear. The Nethervault was safety. Silence.
But Kaelith Ardentor's weak, wheezing laugh echoed louder. The man had thrown himself in front of a trap meant for him. He had chosen faith over survival. To leave him here, paralyzed and helpless, for Aurelise's reinforcements to find... it was a line Ravi was no longer willing to cross. He had made a vow to stop running from consequences. This was his first, and it had a name.
"Hold still," Ravi said, his voice a low command.
He knelt beside the paralyzed War-Priest. The paralytic net crackled with blue energy, the source a small, glyph-etched power pack attached where the wires converged over Kaelith's sternum. Touching the energy field was a risk. Touching the metal pack was a certainty.
He reached out, his fingers steady, and pressed his thumb against the center of the glyph.
There was no hiss this time. There was a sharp, implosive pop, like a light bulb bursting in a vacuum. The glyph shattered. The blue energy of the net vanished. The metal of the power pack simply ceased to be, leaving behind a small, perfectly round hole in the fabric of Kaelith's robe.
Dust. That was all.
The paralysis left the War-Priest's body with a shuddering gasp. Sensation returned, and with it, the full, agonizing pain of his earlier ordeal. He groaned, trying to push himself up on trembling arms.
"Easy," Ravi said, grabbing the larger man's arm to steady him. He half-lifted, half-dragged the War-Priest to his feet. Kaelith was a dead weight of muscle and mail, and the effort was immense.
"My Lord..." Kaelith breathed, his eyes wide with a mixture of pain and ecstatic revelation. "The power to unmake... you are the solvent of creation itself."
"I'm the reason you were on the ground," Ravi corrected him grimly. "Let's save the theology for later. Can you walk?"
Kaelith took a faltering step, then another. "My legs obey. Slowly."
As they turned to leave the ruined square, to retreat to the hidden sewer entrance, Ravi felt it again. A pull. A pressure from the black, shimmering crack in the air. He glanced at it, and for a terrifying second, he felt like it was looking back. A cold, static-laced thought that wasn't his own brushed against his mind: a single, inquisitive pulse of pure, alien curiosity. What is this place?
He flinched back, physically recoiling from the sensation, a profound and instinctual dread seizing him. He grabbed Kaelith's arm tighter. "We need to go. Now."
They plunged back into the tunnels, a strange and mismatched pair: the accidental god and his first, crippled disciple, leaving a scar on the face of the world behind them.
The journey was a tense, stumbling ordeal. When they finally reached the Nethervault, the stone door grinding open to accept them, Lyssara was waiting.
She wasn't relieved. She wasn't triumphant. She was incandescent with a cold, terrifying rage.
"Are you insane?" she whispered, her voice trembling with the force of her fury. She wasn't looking at Ravi. She was staring at Kaelith, at the living, breathing proof of Ravi's catastrophic decision. "You brought him here? To the one place we have, the one sanctuary left to us in this world? You brought a witness, a true believer, a beacon for the Choir right into our home?"
"He saved my life," Ravi stated simply.
"His life is not worth ours!" she shot back, finally turning her blazing eyes on him. "And what he thinks he saw, what you did up there... a reality tear, Ravi? A world-wound? That wasn't a warning shot. That was a declaration of war against the laws of physics. They won't just send guards for you now. They will send armies. They will send their Archons. They will burn this city to the ground to sterilize the 'contamination'!"
Kaelith, leaning heavily against the wall, looked between the two of them. "She is right, my Lord," the War-Priest said, his voice gaining a sliver of its former strength. "I am a liability to you here. A danger."
"We're all dangers now," Ravi said, his voice flat. He walked past Lyssara, his exhaustion a physical weight on his shoulders, and stood before the scrying table. "What's the situation?"
Lyssara followed him, her anger still simmering. "See for yourself," she bit out.
He looked. The sight was worse than he could have imagined.
The center of the Warrens on the map was a dead, gray space, the sigils of the collapsed buildings gone forever. But radiating out from that gray patch was a faint, black line, a scar on the living map. The world-wound. The First Crack. It was a permanent feature of their reality now, and the Nethervault's ancient magic could see it.
Converging on that black line was every power in the city. Warden's Watch from the south. Thornwyn agents from the west. And a flood of silver, the Choir of Threnody, pouring in from the east like a river of faith, Kaelith's absence having confirmed their darkest, most divine suspicions.
But that wasn't what had drained the blood from Lyssara's face.
Emanating from the crack itself was a new signal. It wasn't red, gray, or silver. It was a color that didn't belong, a sick, otherworldly shade of violet-black that pulsed with a slow, hypnotic rhythm, like a diseased heart. And it was growing, spreading a faint, spiderwebbing aura of decay across the map.
"What is that?" Ravi whispered.
"I don't know," Lyssara answered, her voice hollowed out, her anger finally broken by a much deeper fear. "The vault has no reference for it. It's not a magical signature. It's not a life force. The archives describe it with only one word."
She looked at him, her eyes reflecting the eerie, alien pulse from the table.
"Offworld."