Without any notice, no flashbang, no big gate, not even that sick lurch in the stomach that usually came with teleportation, Kael simply was there.
One blink he was in the underground storage room with the zombie's slack corpse still tilting forward, the air smelling like old copper and damp concrete. The next, that smell was gone, replaced by a sterile emptiness that didn't feel like air so much as absence.
He couldn't even believe his own senses, because it wasn't that he moved. It was like the ground under his feet had been rewritten, swapped out while he stood on it. The world hadn't carried him anywhere. The world had changed around him.
Where he stood was a dark room with only a thin blue light ring around him, perfectly circular, perfectly centered, as if someone had drawn a boundary on reality and told it to behave.
