The horizon did not show clouds, winter mists, or the familiar gray storms of the ridge. The natural turbulence of the high altitude, which usually sent freezing gales screaming through the jagged teeth of the peaks, had been completely synthesized into an unnatural, terrifying stillness.
The air itself felt thick, pressurized, and chemically altered, stripped of its wild alpine crispness and replaced by a heavy, metallic weight that hung over the world like an executioner's axe.
Aurelius's vanguard had arrived. Moving through the Interstitial Fracture like a swarm of silent, brass locusts, thousands of monolithic Reaper-Cruisers had materialized in the upper atmosphere all at once. There was no warning rumble of engines, no atmospheric friction of fire and smoke to announce their arrival; they simply tore through the seams of reality, emerging from the blank spaces between dimensions in a synchronized display of terrifying, absolute order.
