The world was nothing but a spill of light and pain.
I floated—or I fell, I no longer knew. My body felt both heavy as lead and light as smoke. Every breath was torture; my lungs burned as if I'd swallowed fire. My head throbbed like a forge gone molten. Time didn't exist here. Everything dissolved—the outlines of my body, the logic of space itself. There was no up or down anymore, just a current dragging me along, a river of incandescent mana where my consciousness slowly unraveled.
I tried to move one arm, then the other, but my limbs were only ideas of flesh, illusions warped by the light. Each time I forced a movement, the pain ran up into my neck, brutal, sharp, almost mechanical. And in that formless chaos, a memory resurfaced like a shard of glass in the fire: Oratius.
I remembered. The fight, the light, the portal. His gaze, calm and pitiless, before everything collapsed.
I had been pulled into a portal.
A cold panic cut through me.
