Achilles took Rose up, and he did it without words.
His hand found the small of her back, and the sea of Tian fell away beneath them. THE Watcher's platinum singularity rose in silence at their side. They climbed together through air that had not yet decided what it wanted to be, past the pillars of white-gold liquid standing upright across the horizon, past the layer where the flood's last currents still moved, up toward the broken mirror of the sky.
He stopped them at the edge.
The shattered space hung in front of him like a wound that had forgotten how to bleed. Tilted shards of sky hinged open above the First Sea, and through the frame of them the obsidian dark of the Unobservable spread outward in every direction that was not a direction.
The bridge ran out of it, the Obsidian Span of the Nine Crowns, holding itself aloft on nothing, obsidian veined with gold, patient as a road that had been waiting a very long time to be walked on.
