Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Twenty Two: This Red Rock

There was an easy description for the Event, one that Hawk had parroted because it was what she had been told: A Prism had focused light so intensely that it tore a hole in the universe and sucked a certain amount of reality down, taking a handful of monkeys and flowers and ants with it. And now these things were spilling back out of the hole. There. Simple. It covered all the facts, without touching the reality.

The hole was the size of most of the monkey house...or, rather, where the monkey house had been. Once she turned the corner, the ground gave way, save for a narrow strip that the  Ape had to navigate with care. Hawk had to cling to the building, digging her fingers into the ash-brittle drywall. If she slipped, it wouldn't be enough to hold her. This strip of earth shouldn't be enough to hold her. Not if it was a true sinkhole. It wasn't. The earth underfoot felt firm. The ground was simply gone, not like a hole dug or worn into the earth, but an ending like the edge of a mirror. Reality just stopped, and within lay darkness. Without, around the edge of the hole, spiraled a million million aural spikes, a cacophony of brightness so enthralling that it seemed a universe all on its own. And Hawk stood in the middle of it and, like the Ape, was unharmed. Perhaps more frightening than the existence of the Glass energy was its unpredictability. She was alive because she'd eaten honeypot ants, but that life never felt quite so fragile as it did right here, on the edge of darkness, with night crowding in. One slip, one biological lapse, and she was dead. And because dwelling on that was unthinkable, she focused instead on the hole and the darkness inside of it.

The darkness was filled with vines.

If she'd had any doubt about her time-theory, They failed as she looked into the hole. The vines grew from some unseen source beneath them all, and they were incredible, as thick around as Hawk's own waist...and growing thicker as she watched. Growth rings pressed themselves into the barrier between this world and that one, forming a tangle as the bud, the source of the growth, terminated into a thin new vine. If pressed, she would have called this tiny evidence of new growth only a few hours old, and the labyrinthine thing beneath, the growth of centuries. But she'd never seen plants grow out of time before. And there were ants moving across the surface fast as lightning...at least until the winged alates made it through the hole into reality. They slowed immediately, going from a speed so fast it defied registration to normal movement. It wasn't just one flight, Hawk realized, but the normal annual cycle made continual by time. It was racing by, beneath that Event horizon. Alates found their way through the hole the way birds would a vent in the sky. And they weren't the only ones. Every few moments another ape emerged from the vines, climbing up to the hole, up from that unknowable, unseen world, up into this one. And this one was different even from the apes all around them. It wore clothes that reminded Hawk more of Victorians, or perhaps even the 1920s. Full shirts, protective pants, masks made of glass and leather. There was a world under there, one where they had access to bits of metal, the ingredients for glass. A whole pocket universe, carved out by Prism and allowed to grow for dozens, even hundreds of generations.

She leaned further forward, until she was hanging over the Event Horizon, with a direct view down. And there, far, far, far below, in the singular spread of light from the Event, sprawled a city. A big one, with towers evident, smaller residences branching out into the darkness. There was a central structure that felt reverential, be it a place of government or a place of worship, and the rest of the structures seemed built around that. The center of the light. Maybe the center of their entire world.

She pulled herself back from the edge of reality, forced herself to press against the safety of the destroyed Monkey House. She looked up into the darkened sky above. There wasn't a cloud to mar it, and there was too much light pollution for stars. Her hair was standing on end, likely from static generated by the Event Horizon. Or else she was about to be struck by lightening from a cloudless sky. When she felt like she'd gotten her balance again, she eased forward, her eyes fixed on the Ape.