The crossbeam snapped.
It didn’t break with the splintering roar of seasoned oak. It shattered with the brittle, glassy crack of stone-hard timber. The heavy timber fell in three jagged sections. That turned to soft grey dust before they struck the flat stone slabs.
Through the widening gap between the doorposts, the maw of the Paradox Wyrm loomed.
It was less a face than a vortex of screaming history. Inside its swirling grey static, Ren caught glimpses of three incompatible skies. A blood-red dawn over burning siege towers, a pitch-black night lit up by gaslamp flares, and a sunless expanse of salt flats where nothing lived. The creature’s causal suction grabbed the edges of Ren’s wool tunic. It snapped the waxed hemp twine at his wrists.
“Ren!” Mira gasped.
Her right arm—smoky, many-sided quartz—was shaking so wildly that the surrounding air around her shoulder began to smell of fried copper and ozone. A second hairline fracture raced across the crystal facet over her lung. She pressed her organic left palm over the fissure. But light leaked through her fingers, violet and furious.
“Look at the options, Ren!” she pleaded, her voice trembling with the certainty that had kept them alive across sixteen brutal lives. “Look at the price! You can’t keep tearing pieces out of yourself!”
