The fabric of reality didn't unzip. It tore.
High above the Pacific, in the thin, killing cold at the top of the sky, a jagged fissure of grey light split the dark. It wasn't a portal. It was a forced entry.
I stepped out of the Akashic Records and into the war.
Time runs differently in the Records. I had known that and not let myself think about it. Somewhere between Akasha's lectern and the last memory of the Dragon Court, hours had passed out here, and in those hours she had arrived.
Gravity seized me at once, and it wasn't the plain pull of Earth. It was the heavy, artificial drag the Demon Armada laid around itself like a cloak.
Thousands of obsidian dreadnoughts hung in orbit, blotting out the sun. Their shadow lay across half the ocean and turned high noon into a bruised purple twilight. The air was thick with Miasma, the dense, restless energy of the Abyss, poured into our sky as if someone had emptied a sea into a bathtub.
