The stratosphere didn’t cry rain or hail under the shadow of the dropping void swarm. It shed ash.
Forty-eight million winged void locusts tore through the upper high sky at hypersonic speed. Then, their serrated back shells and shaking wings snapped against the realm’s sky boundary. That violent friction between living physical space and outer-void breakdown produced an eerie byproduct. Billions of tons of crystal-clear void dust, sloughed off from the space-folding rift and the back shells of the swarm, drifting downward through the thin air like weightless gray snow.
Across five thousand leagues of the sky, the snowfall was total and silent. It didn’t swirl with the whistling music of a winter blizzard, nor did it carry the refreshing, sharp chill of alpine frost. Where each silent gray flake touched a wisp of vapor, the moisture didn’t freeze into ice. It was cleanly erased from reality. That left tiny voids in the upper air that collapsed inward with tiny, muted pops.
Cirrus clouds that had drifted across the high sky for ages evaporated into pale static. It dissolved like rice paper dropped into hot water. The sunlight filtering through the gray veil turned sickly and dim. It cast a dull, monochromatic pallor across three land-wide landmasses. The Grand Desolate Mountain Range, normally crowned with brilliant emerald pine forests and jade rivers, looked as though an ancient funeral shroud had been drawn across its peaks.
