The mountain didn’t move with a crash of thunder, nor did it tear open the sky with arcane fire.
The exchange of eight million cubic yards of living rock was far too huge for dramatic display. It moved with the terrifying, total silence of sky-high physics.
At the exact instant Kezra spoke the word, the air across two hundred and fifty-six paces of the pass tightly packed with a single, chest-hollowing air-pressure thump. The air pressure dropped so precipitously that the moisture in the air condensed into an instant, ghostly white halo of vapor that swelled outward from the boundary seam like the ring of a depth charge in clear water.
The sense reality of moving eight million cubic yards of mountain was something no human language had been designed to record.
It wasn’t a sound. It was an instant, total empty pocket that sucked the air from Kezra’s lungs. Then it made her ears flutter against the oil pads. The air pressure dropped so wildly that the surrounding air heat plummeted ten degrees in a split second, causing a dense, swirling cloud of frost vapor to erupt along the entire one-thousand-and-twenty-four-pace outer edge.
And then, with the majestic, unrushed inevitability of a glacier calving into a deep fjord, the two parcels traded places.
