Upheaval

Fighting on through dusk and into night, they had nearly managed to break the wall of shades standing against them. Red led the charge with her hammer, while the Bard, piping wild notes through his harmonica, tripped the creatures long enough for the Warden’s rootrock soldiers to finish them off. Elias, too, had armed himself – sword and shield scavenged from a fallen enemy warrior – and pushed alongside the others.

The darkness pressed in. He could hardly see, so he simply trusted the judgment of the fighters around him, hoping they wouldn’t be surrounded in the night.

Suddenly, a deafening metallic clang of unknown origin rang through the valley. It was new, it was strange… but they had no time to wonder.

Red sent the last shade before her crashing to the ground, dodged a blow from the side, then leapt clear of the melee and bolted toward Orrendale. “To me!” she shouted as she ran. Bard, Elias, and several of the Warden’s warriors broke from the fight and followed her call.

“It would have been the perfect chance to turn and finish them – now that they’ve broken formation,” Bard grumbled between ragged breaths as they ran. “Ah! How much longer must we carry on?!”

“Save your breath,” Elias urged, though he himself had been short of it for hours.

Now the night was pitch black. The only light came from the two dim suns of the Common Ground, hanging in the sky like pale substitutes for a moon.

“Red – stop!” Elias cried from behind. The rootrock warriors swept past them.

Red turned, breathless. “We need to reach Orrendale as fast as we can!” she explained–

But she never finished. A massive earthquake ripped through the valley, growing stronger with each passing heartbeat.

“They’ve already reached Orrendale!” Red shouted over the roar.

“What?” Elias gasped.

All around them, Elias’s walls and towers – even parts of the labyrinth itself – collapsed in great thunderous falls of stone.

“The Warden told me… should Orrendale fall, the Common Ground ends!” Red cried.

The words pierced Elias like a knife. His heart clenched – he had just sent his son there. Frozen, he could only stare into Red’s eyes.

Then the ground itself split beneath them. In the choking dark they could barely make sense of what was happening, and the shaking earth made it impossible to lift their heads for long. But from the faint glimmer of the dim suns on the craggy peaks around the valley, they saw everything shudder. Some peaks sank entirely from view.

“AAAAAH!”

It was an upheaval of terrible, world-breaking scale.

The ground beneath their feet began to sink, vast cracks yawning open, swallowing everything – and everyone – without distinction. Many of the Warden’s warriors, too slow to react, tumbled screaming into the abyss.

“Run!” Bard shouted.

But where? No one knew.

A great fissure opened vertically between Red and Elias and Bard. They all leapt to the same side – the side where remnants of the labyrinth still clung. Most of its structures had already fallen, but the bases held, and for the moment the ground there seemed steadier, anchored by the roots of Elias’s once-mighty walls.

Then something even more terrifying happened – something that stripped the last hope from Elias’s heart.

The colossal cracks in the earth had cut down to the very bottom. Blinding light surged up from below, sunlight blazing through the new wounds of the world. In an inverted, surreal way, the night was turned almost to day.

Glancing down, they glimpsed the impossible: the suns themselves, drawn into a great gravitational dance, circling around a hidden barycenter deep beneath the ground – the same way they wheeled in the sky by day. The sight burned their eyes, both beautiful and horrifying, as though the world itself had been turned inside out.

“What… what is that?” Bard cried.

Elias shook his head, words failing him, silence the only answer he could give.

The fissures widened still, and massive chunks of land tore apart like drifting tectonic plates – not divided by sea, but by thin air. The quake roared on, deafening, relentless.

And then, for a few breaths, it all paused. Only the trembling of the earth remained – constant, ever-present.

♦♦♦

With palette in one hand and brush in the other, Cecile painted as she fell – a colossal, fiery-feathered seagull. As the creature took shape, her eyes glowed blue.

The bird looked ready to burst away from her and escape, but Cecile had been clever: she had painted a muzzle with reins, and a broad, sturdy saddle on its back. The beast muffled a shriek of defiance through its gag.

“You’re not going anywhere!” she cried, still plummeting, and yanking the reins with all her strength. She swung herself up onto the saddle. The seagull thrashed and fought to break free, wings battering the air, feathers flying loose into the abyss. After a storm of jerks, shouts, and even a little plucking, it finally submitted… for now.

Seizing control, she drove it into the great fissure yawning below, a canyon tearing down into the guts of the earth. Together they dove fast after Fawks, whom she spotted still tumbling toward the abyssal bottom.

For the moment, the widening rift worked in his favor: there was nowhere for him to smash against, only shadows and endless black. But a little deeper, and he would vanish beyond sight.

They got to him! With a sharp dive the seagull tucked its wings, plunging into a controlled freefall beside Fawks. Cecile rose up on the saddle, reins taut, and reached out, her voice tight with desperation: “Come on!”

Her hand seized him – by the wrist – and with one hard pull she hauled him toward her. In the next instant he was sprawled across the saddle, limp in Cecile’s arms.

The great bird spread its wings wide, trying to arc back upward. But they were too low. Too late. The momentum dragged them down, the creature’s body trembling with strain as it beat its wings in panic, claws outstretched as if to brace for impact.

Then came a deafening crack – the final one – and the ground itself tore wide open. They weren’t crashing. They were falling through.

Suddenly they were beneath the world. Light from the suns below flared up in a blinding flood. Around them stretched a cosmos of color – stars, swirling nebulae, and the twin suns burning like molten orbs. Above them loomed the broken Common Ground, hanging like a colossal dark ceiling. It was as if they had fallen through to the farthest reaches of creation, gazing up at their own world as if it were a giant comet or shattered planet drifting across space.

Air was still present and Cecile’s fiery seagull soared higher, beating upward until it found another rift in the torn ground and carried them back toward the surface.

♦♦♦

Elias, Red, and Bard could not comprehend what they were seeing. For a moment, it was as though time itself had frozen. Whole chunks of earth, shaken loose by the quake, hung suspended in the air, floating weightless as if gravity no longer applied. A ringing silence pressed around them, broken only by the groaning of the ground itself.

Their world was being unmade before their eyes – and they were alive to witness it. With the light now streaming from below, every detail was cruelly clear.

The pause stretched for several minutes. Then, far beyond, above Orrendale, a white glow began to rise.

They squinted. It was impossible to make out clearly, but… it almost looked like a figure.

“Is that… the Watcher?” Bard asked.

None of them could tell from so far away.