There was no floor in the dark.
For thirty years on the road, Noll Vey had believed that falling was a physical business involving loose planks, wet hay, or a bailiff’s foot kicking a stool out from under a card table. You struck bottom, you swore at the rafters, you rubbed your hip, and you checked your waistcoat pocket to see if your spare pair of brass spectacles had survived the drop.
This was not that kind of fall.
When the last five points drained out of the ceiling glyphs, the scaffolding of his five-month existence did not merely break; it dissolved. The sense of high granite walls, the map of drainage culverts, the cold iron pintles in the outer gate, the draft through Hobb’s bread ovens—every physical contour he had occupied since the blue seed took him in evaporated into black air.
He was not in the Hall of Witness. He was not in the Grand Hall. He was nowhere that had a north or a south.
In that sudden, bottomless vacancy, every persona he had ever built to keep the rain off his neck peeled away like rotten stage canvas.
The traveling showman with the patched velvet coat and three brass buttons was gone; a showman required an audience with copper in their pockets and mud on their boots, and here there was nobody to watch the sleight-of-hand. The terrifying dungeon master with a valley-wide ledger and an army-eating guest behind a chalk door was gone; that had…
