For Sage, the world didn't freeze into sharp clarity or stretch into cinematic frames like stories often portrayed. Instead, everything imploded inward, as if reality itself had folded into a suffocating point deep in his chest.
Sound disappeared first, the clash of steel, the rumble of collapsing stone, the roar of a battlefield unraveling, until only a hollow ringing remained, thin and distant, like the echo of something precious shattered beyond repair.
His thoughts didn't race or spiral; they simply stopped. Ideas like distance, danger, mana, enemies and even the war raging around him lost their significance in an instant so abrupt and total that it felt less like shock and more like erasure.
Inside him, something cracked. Not loudly, not violently, but quietly and insidiously, like a fracture forming only after pressure had built for far too long. It didn't announce itself until the damage was already done.
