The sensation of falling did not end with a thud. It ended with a suffocating, absolute stillness. Lucien hung in a space that possessed neither light nor mass. The Sanctum was gone, the priest had been reduced to a smear of broken geometry, and the violent storm of collapsing dimensions had smoothed into a grey, stagnant twilight.
He was floating. Beside him, Selene, Nyra, and Seraphina drifted like wreckage in an ocean. They were unconscious, their breaths thin, rhythmic ghosts of life.
"Wake up," Lucien whispered, but his voice made no sound. Sound required air, and there was only the vacuum of a space between realities.
He reached out, his fingers brushing Selene’s cheek. Her skin felt unnaturally cold, lacking the warmth of the living. Panic, sharp and metallic, flared in his chest
