The darkness did not last.
It shattered outward in a sudden, blinding detonation of absolute, featureless white.
The whiteout did not arrive with thunder or heat. It came with an all-consuming, glacial silence that stripped away every dimension of physical space. In a single instant, the circular granite vault, the black basalt plinth, the arched corridors, and the four hundred feet of living mountain bedrock above Jon Hale’s head vanished as though they had never been quarried from the earth. There was no floor beneath his boots; there was no sky above his brow. There was only an infinite, roaring sea of pure, unblemished light in which neither shadow nor contour could survive.
The sounds of the physical world were extinguished all at once.
The distant, catastrophic roar of the imperial trebuchets in the lower orchard, the screams of Dain’s watchmen at the broken breach, the crack of burning cedar shingles, and the weeping of thirty women in the cellar bays dissolved into complete, motionless stillness.
Jon felt his physical body beginning to lose its cohesion.
It was not death; it was disassembly. He could feel his skin, his muscles, and the red marrow of his bones unbinding atom by atom, suspended in a frictionless expanse where the physical laws of mass and velocity had ceased to operate. His breath did not mist in the void, for there was no air to receive it; his pulse did not hammer against his ribs, for time had stopped flowing forward to measure…
