The fragment of the garden plateau drifted.
It was small, barely fifty yards of crystal and scorched earth, a shard that had separated from the main isle the moment the lower tier sheared away. Someone had placed Taryn on it deliberately, finding the piece already moving in the right direction and pushing her onto it before the void could take them both.
She did not know she was on it at first. She knelt at its edge, hands clutching the rim of broken crystal, screaming toward the fire. Her voice vanished before it left her throat, swallowed by the roar tearing through what remained of Luminaris.
Marcus, an observer again now that the vision had loosened its grip, watched her watch the city die.
It happened slowly enough to witness and fast enough to remain incomprehensible. The central spire went first. Threads of light that someone had been weaving, now without a guiding hand, snapped one by one like overstretched wire. The resistance briefly forced into the wall's fissures turned violet. The violet became the hungry dark that had eaten the lumivines since the first crack in the plaza floor.
The tower was consumed rather than toppled. One of the shapes in the sky coiled around it, and the stone stopped being stone, unwoven like the lumivines, matter pulled upward into the scar above. The central spire of Luminaris had stood for ten thousand years. It left no ruins behind.
Taryn's breath became the sound of a door closing for good.
The fragment kept drifting. Around it, other pieces moved too: fragments of the mainland, fallen districts, and broken gardens scattering through the violet mist. Most were dark already, their lumivines converted. Whatever had lived on them was gone.
Taryn watched them drift past.
She remained kneeling at the edge for a long time, bloody hand gripping the crystal rim, storm-gray eyes following the dark islands until they disappeared into the mist. Her armor, leather and silk pieced together over the last desperate hours, was coated in ash and dried residue. The red sigil at her neck had gone quiet, the world's energy too disrupted to sustain its usual warmth.
The lumivines on her own fragment were dying too.
Marcus watched them go as he had watched everything die on this floor, closely and carefully, unable to look away. Bioluminescent leaves curled and blackened in sequence, starting at the fragment's edges and working inward. The glow converted inward, brightness becoming hunger.
A vast city vanished: academies, plazas, forges, and floating gardens. Within an hour, every district had vanished. The only witness left on this piece of it was a girl whose hand had nearly slipped from the crystal rim before someone pulled her to safety.
Taryn lowered her head. She pressed her forehead to the crystal rim and saved her strength for standing.
Then, slowly, she pushed herself upright.
She studied her hands, the blood and soot, the blistered skin where the green sigil had burned itself quiet trying to prevent what happened anyway.
She studied her belt and the vials still hanging there. She counted them, the way someone counts what remains after a fight. She noted which were intact and which had cracked but might still hold.
She did not look back at the place where Luminaris had been.
She looked forward, toward the only landmark left beneath the lightless sky: a jagged needle rising into the bruised horizon. She had always been able to see it from the city's tallest towers, a structure whose name and purpose she had always known without believing it would be the only thing still standing.
She reached down, took a broken crystalline orb split down the center with its light gone, and fastened it to her belt. She kept it.
The fragment drifted toward the Spire's base.
Reality snapped shut with a brutal, concussive jolt. The warmth of the dying garden was torn away, replaced by the immediate, biting chill of Floor One. Marcus breathed in sharply, his lungs filling not with Aetheris ash but with the heavy, ozone-slick atmosphere of the Shattered Threshold.
He stood perfectly upright in his left-forward guard, boots planted on the ink-black plain. Beside him, Taryn adjusted her bandolier, eyes fixed forward, unaware that Marcus had lived through the genesis of her deepest guilt. Lysara walked a few paces ahead, her light-green staff casting a faint violet glow through the jaundiced light seeping from the floor's fissures.
They were passing through a graveyard of colossal, robed stone statues.
The monumental figures rose twice the height of a man, their giant forms carved from the same light-devouring stone as the labyrinth floor. Their garments hung in rigid, brutalist angles, but their faces pulled at Marcus's clinical focus. Every statue possessed a completely smooth, featureless blank where a countenance should have been.
As they moved deeper into the corridor, Marcus's investigator brain flagged a chilling anomaly. The angles of the statues' heads did not remain static. Whenever the team's gaze shifted away, the monolithic giants rotated imperceptibly on their bases, turning their blank faces inward to track the party's progress through the labyrinth.
The statues turned together, their blank faces now aimed at the light behind Marcus.