The dawn at the edge of the world didn’t arrive with the gentle blooming of sunlight or the soft chorus of waking mountain birds.
The gray void to the east flickered twice, like a failing oil lamp sputtering in an empty cellar, before snapping instantly to full morning luminance. There was no dawn slope, no rose-tinted clouds, and no cool dew upon the cracked black shale. The light simply existed, harsh and unbending, washing across a landscape that seemed to be shaking with silent convulsions.
Lin Tao knelt at the mouth of their shallow rock nook, carefully wrapping fresh linen around his scarred fingers.
Beside him, Tie Shan stared out toward the northwest rim of the dark rock shelf. The giant’s jaw was set like a vice. His dark eyes were wide with an unsettling mixture of wonder and deep living nausea.
The horizon was trembling.
It wasn’t a tremor born of earth-shaking upheaval. The rock beneath their knees didn’t rumble, and no dust rose from the hairline cracks in the shale. Instead, the physical contours of the stone cliffs five hundred paces away were fluttering side to side by several inches. It snapped between discrete spatial positions twenty-four times every second.
