On the fourth and final breath of the window, Seyun chose pullback over monument. He didn’t linger a single quarter-beat inside the split bronze drum to watch the inner ring die. He try to catch the parting halves of the housing with his cultivated breath to prove that Early Jade could hold up the sky’s wreckage. The sixth silver governor strand parted at the close of Breath Three. Then, he kicked off the warm dark rock footprint with his stitched left calf and threw his body backward toward the western apron where Ilyra waited.
That immediate, unromantic retreat saved his life by less than six inches. Half a heartbeat after his chest cleared the rear overhang of the drum, the two split halves of the three-ton bronze housing slammed inward against each other in the center of the stone basin. It crushed the exact patch of dark rock where his boots had been planted.
Even as he cleared the crushing jaws of the housing, however, the dying spinning backlash of the split inner ring lashed outward through the gap one last time. The eastern half of the bronze drum toppled sideways against the western half. Then, a whip-like arc of uncompressed, unguided return current—with a spinning twelve-inch pipe rim of snapped bell bronze—burst out of the collapsing seam.
