Valen Ashbluff looked up—and cold flooded his veins.
Alyssara Velcroix smiled from the sky as if she had always belonged there. Heat-haze bled around her, reality rippling the way air wavers above a sun-baked road. Jade-green eyes drank the light; hair the color of rose quartz spilled like silk through starlight. She raised no hand, spoke no word.
The world turned.
Sound vanished. Weight changed. Space folded without motion and placed Valen somewhere that did not exist on any map he had ever studied. The air was too still, too heavy, as if attention itself pressed down. He felt the shape of a place that was both vast and intimate—no walls, yet enclosed—woven through with quiet that did not admit echoes.
Alyssara's world.
