The storm didn’t fall from the sky. It was exhaled by the earth.
Tiny droplets of freezing, stone-rich water detached themselves from the dead scrub and dry grass, floating upward in straight, orderly columns toward a ceiling of pale slate clouds. When Ren Vale reached out with his bare left hand, a droplet struck his palm from below. He splashed upward against his knuckles with the sharp, acidic sting of sulfur and rusted iron.
Rumble.
The thunder rolled across the salt flats—deep, bone-shaking, and heavy.
Four seconds later, a jagged branch of violet lightning flashed across the clouds, lighting up the horizon in a silent, backward glare.
“Thunder preceding discharge by 4.12 seconds,” Chrono-Scribe Ren noted from his seat on the driver’s bench of the mule cart. His slate-grey coat was buttoned to his chin, his brass measuring tongs resting across his knees alongside his upward-flowing hourglass. “Surrounding causality is inverted along the upright axis. If you drop an awl, Conservator, catch it before it reaches the clouds.”
Ren walked beside the lead mule, his hand resting on the leather bridle to keep the frightened animal from bolting.
His thirty-one-year-old knees had loosened somewhat after two hours of steady marching. But the damp, upward-rising mist brought a sharp, cold stiffness to his hip joints. He pulled his lambskin apron tighter against his chest. He tucked his silver hair beneath a wool traveling cap.
