The sanctum drew a breath.
That's the only way I can describe it. The whole cold, wrong-angled room inhaled, sharp and deep, and the air went thick and tight and started to prickle against my skin. Alyssara didn't move. She didn't need to. She'd stopped being a woman in the room. The room was her now.
The walls rippled like muscle under skin. Then, with a groan I felt in my teeth more than heard, two of them tore loose from the idea of standing still and came at me from either side. They were hundreds of metres apart and they closed that distance like a pair of hands clapping, and I was the fly.
'Running won't do it.' I didn't try to outrun them. I folded. A seam opened under my feet and I fell through it and came out sixty metres up, and below me the walls met with a sound like the world being slammed shut. Pieces of something that wasn't quite stone sprayed through the space I'd just left.
