The Citadel did not move with the grinding of wheels or the heave of engines. Instead, the world outside the obsidian walls simply began to blur. The Frost-Spire Mountains stretched like pulled taffy, their snowy peaks elongating into white streaks before snapping out of existence entirely. In their place came the "Between"—a grey, static-filled expanse where the rules of geometry went to die.
Alicia gripped the battlements, her boots vibrating with the resonance of the shadow-thread. "He's doing it. He's piercing the veil."
As the city-needle punched through the grey static, the violet sky above turned a bruised crimson. They were no longer in the North. They were traversing the "unwritten margins" of the world, the empty spaces between the maps where the Void usually reigned supreme.
Suddenly, the shadow-thread groaned. A massive, jagged shape loomed out of the grey fog—a floating continent of tangled, rusted wire and calcified bone. This was the first of the Frayed Provinces: the Iron Velvets. Once a kingdom of master weavers who supplied the armor for the ancient gods, it had been reduced to a skeletal graveyard of scrap metal and mourning spirits.
"Look there!" Nelluru pointed toward the rusted continent.
Crawling across the wires were creatures that looked like massive, skeletal spiders, their bodies made of intertwined copper cables and glowing red glass. These were the "Loom-Scavengers," the remnants of the kingdom's automated defenses, now corrupted by the Void's hunger. They didn't just want the Citadel's light; they wanted its "Realness" to patch their own decaying forms.
From the Sky-Fray, Clevatess's voice rumbled like thunder through the obsidian floor. "Alicia... prepare the ink. The Iron Velvets are not empty. They are a wound that refuses to close. We must stitch the scrap back into a shield, or the scavengers will unmake the foundations of our home."
Alicia uncapped the raven-bone pen. The indigo ink within it began to boil.