Everything was blurry for a long time. I fell, and kept falling, for a long time too. In the first stretch of that plunge through the darkness there was only the stinging pain, radiating through every inch of me, and I tried to duck into my Soul Sanctum to escape the cost of feeling it. It was futile.
I could not access my Soul Sanctum.
It was a lot like that Chameleon's gate, where for some reason I hadn't been able to enter my Soul Sanctum. Here, I couldn't either.
And so I was left to swallow the pain whole. But I wasn't alone.
The darkness rushed past so fast I lost left from right, up from down, every sense of direction stripped away until nothing was left but the falling itself.
But through all of it, one warm thing refused to leave my hand. Fingers clasped tight around mine, and though the speed of the fall should have torn us apart, they stubbornly held. Nothing in that endless black was enough to pry them loose.
