Klaus's fingers tightened against Dudu's obsidian scales. The energy leaking from that rift felt disturbingly familiar. It wasn't the mana of Runiya. It was something else entirely — something he'd studied across lifetimes.
Tomas Veil's memories surged forward unbidden[1]. In that life, decades spent hunched over ancient texts in candlelit archives, tracing the patterns of rift appearances across continents. The scholarly obsession that had consumed him. The conclusion he'd reached moments before dying of old age, feverish and forgotten: Rifts weren't tears to other dimensions. They were bridges. Bridges between continents on the same world.
"Is it really true?" Klaus whispered to the wind. Below him, thousands of chitinous creatures scuttled across the pristine snow, their iridescent blue armor catching the weak northern sun. "Have they been doing this for centuries? Millennia? Why?"
