The mountain range ahead didn’t belong to a single world.
Where the northern lip of the dry salt basin ended, the earth thrust upward in a huge, jagged barrier four thousand feet high. But it wasn’t a natural earth-shaking ridge formed by millions of years of land-wide pressure.
It was an impossible geographic crash.
To the west, the peaks were carved from pale, ice-worn granite, their knife-edge crests coated in ancient, blue-tinted ice from a timeline that had suffered an unending land-wide winter. To the east, fusing directly into the granite with a violent, upright seam, the ridge transformed into black fiery dark rock and jagged sulfur crags from an arid epoch that had never known snow.
Along the seam where the two divergent ranges met, gravity leaned ten degrees to the left. The draft mules groaned, bracing their shins against the slope as their hooves fought an invisible, lateral drag that pulled every pebble toward the dark rock wall. When a loose slate fragment tumbled from the path, it didn’t fall straight down. It slid along an oblique slanted angle, skipping sideways across the bedrock like a flat stone skipped across calm water.
Ren Vale reached out, bracing his shoulder against the wheel of the cart to help steady the load.
