At a height of sixty thousand paces above the mortal continent, the air ceased to behave like air.
The descent of the Extradimensional Void Swarm was not a gradual settling of winged beasts, but an avalanche of negative mass plunging through the stratosphere swifter than fourfold thunder. Forty-eight million winged void locusts tore through the fractured cloud ceiling. Then, their jagged black glass back shells and shaking wings emitted a high-hum entropic hum that instantly deleted every molecule of surrounding sky moisture.
Across five thousand leagues of the upper sky, the air turned into a bone-dry, soundless desert of choking negative pressure. Cirrus clouds, woven over hundreds of years by natural weather patterns, vanished into thin gray static. The heat across three land-wide landmasses plummeted fifty degrees in less than twenty breaths, coating mountain peaks in unnatural, glassy frost that had no dew point. The wind itself seemed to lose its breath, unable to propagate sound or carry the scent of earth through the widening void.
The sheer thickness of the dropping swarm eclipsed what little surrounding starlight filtered through the ten-thousand-mile rift. Looking up from the mortal valleys below, the heavens appeared as though a huge jar of black ink had been tipped across wet silk. A writhing, multi-jointed canopy of needle-limbs, clicking jaws, and dead sharp-angled eyes dropping like an iron-hard ceiling of living hard shell.
