The edge of the world did not appear suddenly. It announced itself in the thinning of the air and the change in the wind's voice.
For the last hour of their travel, the wind stopped howling. It ceased to push against the wagon's canvas cover. Instead, it began to pull. A gentle, relentless suction drew the dust, the ash, and the sound of their breath toward the southern horizon.
Kaelen felt it in his ears first—a pressure drop that made his head thrum like a plucked lute string.
"Brake," he murmured.
The word was barely a whisper, yet in the unnatural quiet, it sounded like a shout.
Korgath hauled back on the iron lever. The brake pads groaned against the wheel rims, not squealing, but vibrating with a low, resonant hum. The Strider-beasts stopped willingly, digging their claws into the fused glass. They refused to take another step. They lowered their heads, tucking their sensitive snouts beneath their forelegs.
"We are here," Kaelen said.
He wrapped his scarf tighter around his face, covering his nose and mouth, and climbed down.
They stood at the precipice of the Great Severance.
It was not merely a canyon. It was a failure of geography. The obsidian plateau they had been traversing simply ended, sheared off as if by a cosmic cleaver. Beyond the edge, there was no opposite bank. There was only a vast, purple expanse of heavy atmosphere, stretching out for miles before fading into a bruised obscurity.
Floating in that expanse, suspended by physics that no longer made sense, were the debris fields. Mountains that had been ripped from their roots drifted lazily in the ether. Shattered aqueducts, upside-down cathedrals, and islands of rock the size of cities bobbed in the currents of the Void, turning slowly, like driftwood in a stagnant pond.
And tethered to the cliff edge, extending out into the fog like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man, was the Chain.
It was a single link of wrought iron, massive enough that three men could walk abreast upon it. It stretched out into the gloom, connecting the mainland to the distant, floating rust-heap of Sector 7.
"It is... quiet," Elara whispered. She stood near the wagon, gripping the side for balance. The suction of the wind pulled her hair toward the drop.
"Don't look down," Vanya warned softly. The elf was leaning against the wagon wheel, her blindfold damp with the moisture of the air. "The abyss does not like to be observed. It has a habit of looking back."
Kaelen ignored them. He walked to the very lip of the cliff. He pulled out his spyglass—a brass tube etched with protective runes—and extended it. He didn't look at the destination. He looked at the space between.
His Audit began to click in his mind. A rhythmic tapping behind his eyes.
Atmospheric density: Fluctuating. Gravity shear: Nominal. Void-Current: Rising.
He lowered the glass.
"We wait," Kaelen said.
"Wait?" Elara asked, stepping closer to him, though she stayed a respectful distance from the drop. "For what? The bridge is right there."
"Look," Kaelen said, pointing a gloved finger into the purple haze below the chain.
Elara squinted. At first, she saw nothing. Then, she saw the lights.
They were rising from the depths, miles below. They were not stars, and they were not fire. They were pale, bioluminescent spheres, translucent and pulsing with a sickly, gelid rhythm. They drifted upward in a slow, silent shoal, millions of them, like bubbles rising in a glass of champagne.
"Jellyfish?" she asked.
"Memories," Vanya corrected from the wagon. Her voice was tight with pain. "They are the Mnestic Spores. The Void digests matter, Elara, but it cannot digest history. It excretes it. Those bubbles are the leftover moments of the things that fell."
The shoal of lights rose higher, reaching the level of the cliff.
The intrusion was not violent. There was no wind, no roar of a monster. There was only a sudden, overwhelming sense of presence.
As the spheres drifted past the cliff edge, floating up into the sky, the reality around the party began to soften.
Kaelen watched a sphere the size of a human head drift past Korgath. Inside the sphere, played out in loop of grey smoke, was a scene: A woman baking bread in a kitchen that no longer existed. She laughed, turned to a window, and then the sphere rotated, and the image dissolved into static.
Another sphere drifted past the wagon. Inside, a sword struck a shield. The sound—clang—echoed in Elara's mind, though the air remained silent.
"Do not touch them," Kaelen ordered, his voice flat. He stood perfectly still as the tide of lights surrounded them. "If you touch them, they burst. And if they burst, the memory replaces your own."
The party froze.
It was a tableau of dread. The massive Orc, the blind Elf, the scavenger, and the girl, all standing motionless on a cliff of black glass, while a silent blizzard of glowing orbs drifted around them.
One of the spheres floated directly toward Elara.
She held her breath. The sphere was beautiful, swirling with colors she didn't have names for—a mixture of sunset-orange and bruised-violet. Inside, she saw a hand reaching out. A small hand. A child's hand.
It hovered inches from her face. The suction of the void wind seemed to stop. The gravity seemed to suspend.
She felt a pull. Not physical, but mental. A terrible, weeping urge to reach out and pop the bubble, to know who the hand belonged to. To feel the warmth of that memory, even if it wasn't hers. In this cold, dead world, the promise of warmth was the deadliest trap of all.
"Elara," Kaelen said. He didn't shout. He didn't move. He just spoke her name with the weight of an anchor. "Look at your boots."
"It's so warm," she whispered, her eyes wide, reflecting the swirling light.
"It is a lie," Korgath rumbled. The Orc's eyes were closed tight. A sphere was bouncing gently against his pauldron, seeking purchase. "The warmth is digestion. Look at your boots, girl."
Elara's hand twitched. The obsidian dagger in her grip felt heavy, cold, and real. The sphere felt light, warm, and fake.
She looked down.
She focused on the scuffed leather of her boots. On the grey ash that dusted the laces. On the reality of the dirt.
The sphere hovered for a heartbeat longer, sensing her rejection, and then drifted upward, joining the millions of others ascending into the upper atmosphere to dissipate into nothingness.
For twenty minutes, they stood there. The tide of lost memories washed over them, a silent river of ghosts flowing upside down.
And then, as quickly as it had begun, the supply exhausted itself. The last few spheres bobbed up from the abyss, lonely and dim, and vanished into the clouds.
The wind returned. The suction pulled at their clothes again. The silence lost its heavy, watching quality and returned to the simple, empty silence of a dead landscape.
Kaelen exhaled. A plume of white vapor escaped his scarf.
"All assets accounted for?" he asked, his voice raspy.
"Mental integrity at 90%," Korgath grunted, opening his eyes. He brushed his shoulder where the sphere had touched him, as if brushing away a spider web.
"I can taste them," Vanya whispered, spitting onto the ground. "They taste like copper and regret."
Kaelen walked over to Elara. She was still looking at her boots. She was trembling.
"You did good," he said quietly.
She looked up. Her eyes were wet. "Who were they?"
"They were the heavy things," Kaelen said. He gestured to the abyss. "Gravity takes the rock. The Void takes the flesh. But the feelings... the loves, the hates, the moments... they float. They're lighter than air."
He turned back to the cliff edge. He adjusted his gloves, tightening the straps.
"The tide is out," Kaelen announced. He looked at the massive iron chain stretching into the fog. It was slick with the moisture from the spheres, glistening like a wet intestine.
"The path is open. But it's slick. We walk the beasts. Korgath, you take the rear brake. I take the lead."
He stepped onto the first link of the chain. It was wide, rusted, and terrifyingly solid beneath his feet. Beneath him, miles of nothing. Above him, a sky that had just swallowed a million lives.
"Welcome to the Great Severance," Kaelen muttered. "Watch your step."