Belle turned, slow and deliberate, as though the act itself carried weight.
The storm above her did not relent. Vespera clouds churned endlessly, folding over one another in thick, violent spirals, black lightning threading through them like veins beneath living flesh.
Each thunderclap distorted the air, each flash briefly illuminating the devastation around her. The ground beneath her armored boots no longer resembled land at all; vast slabs of stone hovered in fractured gravity, suspended as though reality had forgotten how to let them fall.
Far below, the sea boiled and warped, its surface tearing itself apart where the laws governing the world could no longer agree.
He was already there.
Belle did not try to see his face. Experience had taught her better than that. The curse denied her such things; faces were taken from her sight long ago, reduced to absences, her perception slid around without ever grasping.
