"I wouldn't bet on it, Ty," I said, my voice sounding weirdly flat, like I was speaking into a thick wool blanket.
The air in the Void-Wastes didn't just taste like ozone; it felt thin, lacking the "vibrancy" of the world we'd just left. If Aethelgard was a lush, saturated oil painting, this place was a charcoal sketch done on a half-erased canvas. The silver sand beneath my boots shifted with a metallic clink-clink-clink, sounding more like crushed lightbulbs than grit.
But the biggest problem wasn't the sand. It was the dog.
Cerberus—the scruffy, three-legged hound who had been begging for ham scraps yesterday—was currently the size of a small cottage. His three heads were weaving in independent arcs, his six eyes glowing like embers in the dark. The black smoke that made up his new leg hissed as it touched the silver sand, and every time he let out a low growl, the stars in the purple sky seemed to flicker.
