The sound was not an explosion. It was the tearing of dry linen amplified ten thousand times.
Above the apex sanctum, the circular tear in the sky split from edge to edge. The jagged borders of the rift, once forty yards wide, surged outward with bone-shaking violence, swallowing the leftover dark rock castle walls of the tower in a single, silent gulp. Stone wall-brackets, gargoyles, and crenellations didn’t shatter into gravel. They simply dissolved into floating clouds of fine grey soot that were instantly sucked upward into the starry black mouth of the Seventh Seam.
The sky of the Melting Borderlands was gone.
In its place hung the deep-sea depths of uncreated time—a swirling, bottomless ocean of total pitch, salted with the cold, dead light of billions of frozen stars.
At the center of the chamber, the Great Paradox Spindle shrieked like a dying god.
Without the counterweighted pendulums to govern its gear catch, the thirty-foot monolith of black gold-silver metal spun at six thousand turns a minute. The air around the column was spark-charged into sheets of violet and grey star-fire that licked against the fractured glass floor. The world-size drag of its counter-natural rotation was so intense that gravity itself began to twist sideways. Loose shards of glass and iron rivets were pulled in spiraling orbits around the fluted pillar, speeding up until they glowed cherry-red from sky friction.
