The exposed Cosmic Core was a three-hundred-pace sphere of faceted, rotting diamond.
Deep within its crystal-clear facets swirled the black, ancient slime of the First Disaster. The condensed root of every specter, ghoul, and rotten oddity that had ever poisoned the earth.
Sensing the mortal star standing before it, the core panicked.
For millions of years, it had known only the slow, cold ingestion of scared mortal dynasties.
It didn’t possess the mental stonework for fear.
Yet its survival reflexes were world-size in scale.
The leftover two miles of the titan’s stone-hard torso twisted.
Earth-shaking bedrock from the surrounding mantle was yanked wildly inward by non-Euclidean gravity eddies.
