Three hundred feet above the shattered dark rock court of the northern ridge, the halved forty-foot tear in the low winter cloud deck had no anchor left on the mountain below to hold its edges apart. For forty years, the northern sky-slit of the Hollow Summit had been propped open by a nonstop loop of downward check and upward return. The upper rim drew pressure from the high sky strata, the three bronze sockets and the central returning hub shaped that pressure into forty-breath sweeps. The living human anchor chained in the seal court absorbed the phase-error so the tear in the sky never healed.
Now every single link in that forty-year loop was broken. The iron chair in the seal court was empty. The northern chamber floor was cracked into bedrock. The central bronze drum lay split in two. The six socket halves sat cold on dead shale. And the last backup wall relay had just been smashed flat with a granite cobble.
Starting at the exact jagged notch on the northern rim that Nara Soth had cut with her Listening Crown cuts during the third and fourth watches, the harsh, chalk-white border of the sky-slit began to unravel like a cut seam in heavy canvas.
