My mage-sight twisted into incomprehensible shapes for three heartbeats before snapping into the patterns around Kamenhe. In the same instant, my spell connected to my friend Jace Songdog, who stood in the matching diagram in Kamenhe's pinnacle.

The pattern of her magic was as familiar to me as her smile, a steadying sight in the face of what felt like an endless task. Pale light gleamed in her soul, as if the seed of a star glimmered in her chest, and for a moment guilt pinched me. I pushed it aside. We had both known we were risking everything when we'd faced the void together.

"Over Ibexen," I murmured dreamily, examining the drifting flow of power in the sky. The strands of ley energy curved around an eddying current of celestial power. As I watched, the pool started pinching outwards, like watching the funnel of a tornado form. When it touched the ground, a meteor would follow in an instant, a broken piece of the celestial firmament falling between the planes, drawn towards the opposing Abyssal Plane through the world that sat between. "It's broken into three parts. They'll come through in a two-point-one-three second timespan. Are you ready?"

Jace's power shifted, twining through the world. The tiny motes of magic in every particle of chalk-dust in her diagram glittered in my vision as they drifted up off of the floor, held in the patterns she'd drawn by the flow of magic through them but affected by the gravitational negation of her power burn-off. Even in the state of meditative calm every mage maintained during complex spells, the sheer magnitude of Jace's magical strength left me feeling awed, as if I stood in the presence of a goddess. I was the sixth-most powerful sorcerer on the Material Plane, and I couldn't hold a candle to her.

"Yes," she said, her sweet voice calm and clear. "Trigger the spell whenever you're—"

My connection to Jace and Kamenhe cut out.

"Shit!" I yelped, tearing off my blindfold and wincing as the light made tears spring to my eyes. Something was disrupting my diagram. Something was on my lines—

A mouse worked its way along one of my carefully-chalked marks, sniffing along it, chalk dusting its whiskers. Panic flared beneath my calm. No time, no time—

I called the first thing I could think of to my hand – a heap of rock salt – and flung it at the mouse. It fled, bolting for the stairs. With my eyes squeezed shut and the world seen red through my eyelids, I flung myself back into the spell, grabbing for Jace.

"Rain!" she cried when my power slammed into hers. "Rain, what's happening?"

There was no time to answer. I threw my focus out towards the city of Ibexen, desperately hoping that I could get in place before the pieces of the Celestial Plane broke through into mine. As I raced for the line of power, it touched down in the Ibexen market.