The silence that followed Queen Lysandra's sacrifice lasted barely three heartbeats before the first crack appeared in her crystalline barrier. It was a hairline fracture, no wider than a strand of spider's silk, but in the absolute stillness of the frozen Hollow, its appearance rang out like the toll of a funeral bell. Selena watched in growing horror as the crack spread across the surface of the ice wall that now encased the Gate, branching and multiplying like veins of darkness through crystal.
The barrier that had cost a queen her life, that had transformed half the Hollow into a monument of eternal winter, was already beginning to fail.
