The first breath after the shadow's retreat did not feel like breathing.
It felt like issuing a verdict.
Air slid into her lungs and came back altered—sharpened, humming, aware of itself. She could taste iron at the edges of the inhale, as though the wind had passed through blood before reaching her. When she exhaled, the horizon changed.
Not visibly at first—just a shiver through the layers of Spiralspace, like the skin of a drum shifting under a player's palm. Then, without warning, the ground bloomed.
Stone rose in smooth spirals from beneath her toes, coiling out into plazas that had not existed a heartbeat ago. Walls rose, not brick by brick but as whole thoughts: a market square alive with the smell of sweet breads she had never baked, gardens full of flowers whose colors ached in her eyes.
She did not will them into being. She simply breathed.
