"The connection between our world and yours," Izel said, "is not a fixed thing. It is a thread. It is fraying. The stone you touched is the only gateway that has ever existed. It was not meant to open without the goddess's power to sustain it. When you fell through, you did not merely cross. You pulled on a thread that had been dormant for eight hundred years. The thread held. But it will not hold forever."
She lowered her hand from the tablet. The glow faded but did not disappear entirely. A faint green light remained, pulsing under the surface of the stone like a vein of water under ice.
"The flickering you saw in the temple above, the flickering you felt when you touched the stone. That is the thread beginning to give."
Mariana's mind was moving now. Processing data. Fitting variable
