The ash did not drift like northern snow; it settled with a heavy, mathematical finality that choked the valleys and erased the ancient fissures of the Western Ridge. It was the residue of a world systematically unmade—calcified granite, incinerated pines, and the vaporized marrow of seven thousand generations of Lycan vanguards, all ground down into a uniform, colorless powder that felt like cold lime between the fingers.
Gwen stood knee-deep in the soot where the high courtyard of the Blackfang Fortress had once dominated the horizon. Her boots sank into the pulverized remains of a rune-carved column that had survived twenty imperial sieges, only to be reduced to a gray silicon deposit during their brief absence.
"The temporal compression was asymmetrical," Lucien said, his voice cutting through the flat, windless silence like the striking of a dead iron wire.
