[Lucien]
The fall should’ve killed me.
I expected to be drowning when I dived into that lake but somehow, I was falling.
I hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater, the shock rattling through my bones. For a few seconds, all I could do was stare up at the sky—or what little of it I could see. Hundreds of feet above, a jagged crack split the rock and light bled through it although it didn’t reach the bottom.
I lay in the middle of a dry canyon. It was deep and narrow. The air was thick with dust and an odour I couldn’t quite explain. Something like rot. The stone walls on either side of me seemed to squeeze in tighter the further up they rose, like someone could hop over the canyon’s crack without much effort.
The ground beneath me wasn’t uneven to a fault. Like they’d poured littl
