The collision was not a sound, but a conceptual trauma. When the makeshift carriage of brass and binary-broken logic struck the palace gates, reality didn't just break. It unspooled.
Lucien slammed into the polished obsidian floor of the Grand Foyer, the air knocked out of him. He scrambled to his feet, tasting the metallic tang of static on his tongue. Behind him, the palace doors were no longer doors. They were expanding rectangles of pure, featureless white, eating the horizon of the city. The Echo stood atop the sweeping central staircase, its long coat flapping in a wind that shouldn't exist, the glowing white quill in its hand poised like a scalpel above a patient.
"Seraphina! Nyra!" Lucien shouted, his voice nearly drowned out by the grinding roar of the city's under-gears.
Nyra
