She arrived.
One breath she hung three hundred feet above the hills outside the Chasm, wings flared, smile sharpening like a blade at the sneaky bastard behind her. The next, the world blurred into streaks of night and starfire. She poured herself forward at velocities the sky had never been designed to endure.
Mach ten. Mach twelve.
A living comet of white starlight unspooling across the Pacific, the air behind her collapsing into thunder that never reached mortal ears — because she had already devoured every mile before the sound could even dream of forming.
The ocean flattened beneath her into a long trench of panicked spray. Clouds parted in reluctant awe for a thing that had no business moving through them.
A migratory flock of seabirds half an ocean away would spend the rest of the week chattering in whatever language birds used that something impossible had passed overhead so fast the wind itself had bowed in submission.
And then she was there.
