“I’ve read about these,” Alishia said. “They started happening after magic fled. There was only one recorded in the first hundred years, but in the past few decades they’ve been happening all over. Flushing away all the badness left behind, some say. Maybe they’ll eventually join up to suck the whole of Noreela away.”

It was a mile distant but easily visible. Even Trey, new to the surface and ignorant of many of its features, knew that it did not belong here. It looked unreal and incongruous. And it sounded like a long, endless growl.

The ground stirred slowly around the hole, traveling in a lazy, decreasing circle, clumps of grass and rock and the waving arms of shrubs and trees turning and tumbling as they were drawn in. The air above it shimmered. Trey tried to picture the caves and passageways in the ground below, the places where this hole vented, but like the whirlpools in the underground rivers and lakes, he could not imagine it having an end. Not in this world, at least.

“It must have just started,” Alishia said.

“Will it spread? Should we run?”

Alishia shook her head. “They’re always quite small. It’s probably a hole the size of your fist. Nobody knows where they go, but you can find traces of old ones sometimes, like deep throats at the base of a crater. If we wait here long enough, perhaps we can go and take a look.”

The sight dizzied Trey; so much landscape still and peaceable, and this patch of it moving slowly at the edges, faster farther in, blurred into nothing at the very center. A big bird flew quickly overhead, dipped down at the disturbed earth to look for worms and insects and was sucked in, leaving floating feathers in its wake.

“What was that?” Trey asked, aghast.

“Moor hawk,” Alishia said wondrously. “I’ve never seen one before!”

“Well, you won’t see that one again.”

“I wonder if it’s still whole,” she said, and the idea disturbed Trey into silence.

They sat and watched the swallow hole slowly consume everything within its reach. Plants and soil spat themselves skyward with the pressure, only to be caught again by the hole’s influence and pulled down into its maw. And then the clays and rocks below the soil, the noise of their demise echoing across and vibrating through the land, grinding and smashing together, crushing, throwing up dust and shards that were similarly caught and sucked down. A rainbow formed briefly overhead as the air itself started to move, moisture condensing and darkening the spinning ground, small clouds forming high above and spiraling downward. Air breezed past Alishia and Trey, insects and birds fluttering uselessly against their fate. It was as if the hole was trying to suck in the sky.