Jolthar looked around him first, taking stock of the world he had returned to.
The crater stretched wide beneath where his domain had stood, a perfect black circle carved into the villa's courtyard floor, easily thirty feet across and deep enough that the lantern light barely reached its bottom.
The stone tiles that had once formed an elegant walking path were simply gone at the crater's edges, sheared away as cleanly as if some great hand had reached down and scooped out a portion of the earth itself. Dust still drifted upward from it in slow, lazy spirals, catching the moonlight before dissolving into the night air.
He had no memory of the domain taking the ground with it.
That was new. He looked around and at the top where Milan stood.
He bent his knees and leapt.
The jump carried him clear out of the crater in a single motion, his boots finding solid stone on the far side with barely a sound, and he straightened to find the courtyard in a state he hadn't expected.
