The palace's strategic command center converted to a crisis room in minutes. Holographic panes ringed the walls, each streaming scrying and satellite feeds from the impact zone. Readouts crawled; alarms throttled between amber and red. At the center of every view lay the same impossibility: the Infernal Armis planted in a crater that straddled the border and ran deep into Savage Communion lands. Space around it kinked and drew tight, as if a predator were flexing claws through reality.
"Seriously, what the fuck is that?" Kali said. The air near the artifact rippled in non-Euclidean pulses that made the eye want to look away.
"A Mythical-grade artifact," I said, tracking stress lines that didn't belong to any known metric. "One of seven that drift the seams of space-time. They surface where the walls between worlds thin."
Mythical-grade artifacts aren't made in any single world and they don't obey local ceilings on power. They rewrite the ceiling.
