The sky above the Hegemonic Frontier didn’t merely crack. It tore open like cheap raw, unwhitened cotton under the blade of an unsharpened shear.
Frank walked out from the office manor onto the central parade ground, the icy mountain gale howling through his heavy denim overalls. Directly in the center of the flat stone slabs was the four-foot buzzing white red ‘X’ he had sprayed forty-eight hours ago. Right down the center of the red paint, a hairline fracture was unzipping at the speed of a galloping horse.
CRACK-CRACK!
The hairline fracture widened into a six-inch seam, then a two-foot gap, then a four-foot deep gap of total, lightless black glass void! Paving stones weighing two tons each were snapped in half with the sharp report of breaking slate, tumbling down into a bottomless black deep pit that exhaled a freezing draft of ancient frost.
High above the castle, the sky dome of the world was dying in real time. The ten-thousand-year-old Heaven-Locking Barrier—a golden, semi-clear crystal-clear ceiling that had shielded the five-hundred-mile northern frontier since the First Epoch—was covered in a spiderweb of fifty miles of jagged black fractures! Where the fractures spread, surrounding spiritual energy was being sucked out of the mortal air with the ear-splitting roar of an unsealed airlock!
