The gate closed behind them with a sound like a tomb sealing.
Lucifer didn't look back.
He couldn't.
The moment his boots touched the ground on the other side, the world—if it could be called that—tried to swallow him whole.
Grey.
Endless grey.
The sky had no sun, no stars, no clouds. Just a flat, infinite ceiling of nothing. The ground beneath his feet was cracked and dry, like a riverbed that hadn't seen water in millennia. Broken pillars jutted from the earth at odd angles, remnants of structures that had no architects.
And the smell.
Old. Dusty. Like a library that had been burning for a thousand years.
Damaris stood beside him, his wings folded tight against his back. His golden eyes scanned the horizon—if there was a horizon. Everything blurred into everything else.
"The Threshold," Damaris said quietly. "The space between what is and what was."
Lucifer took a step forward. His shadow stretched behind him—longer than it should have, warped at the edges.
