The gold was not a color; it was a physical weight.
When my fingertips made contact with the surface of the Earth-Pillar—the massive, pulsating Geode of the First Alpha—the world of the physical and the world of the spiritual collided with the force of two planets grinding together. The blinding radiance that erupted from the sphere didn't just fill the chamber; it penetrated my skin, my muscles, and my very marrow. It was heavy, ancient, and tasted of deep-veined iron and the silence of tectonic plates.
I had been falling. The Silver-Reaper had severed the oceanic resonance of the Tide-Pack, stripping away my obsidian scales and leaving me shivering in my own ivory skin. I had felt small, a "wolfless" girl once more, cowering beneath the scythe of a madman.
But the moment I touched the Heart, the falling stopped.
