“Wait,” Zezili said. “Your world? You mean your country. Your country’s dying?”

Monshara raised her hand in greeting to the riders. The riders made a similar salute. Best Zezili could tell, the riders were three women and one man. The man trailed after the women, as was proper in Dorinah.

The riders arrived and exchanged a few words with Monshara in a language that sounded a lot like Dhai. Was it some dialect?

“Should I step back or something?” Zezili asked.

“That won’t be necessary,” Monshara said.

The four riders formed a broad circle. They raised their arms.

The air thickened. A massive boom rocked the field. Zezili’s legionnaires cried out. Raised their hands to their ears. Zezili wondered, then, if this was all some fun ruse – have the legionnaires slaughter the camp, then slaughter the legionnaires in turn with some great trick. But that thought was short-lived, because it was at that moment that the ground around Zezili’s feet began to harden.

Bloody mist roiled up from the soil and filled the sky. Zezili took a breath and gagged on coppery, blood-soaked air. Beneath her, the ground cracked and heaved. Zezili stumbled forward and caught herself on a fresh body. Blood burst from the corpse. She rolled to the side. Gazed across the field. One by one, the corpses burst and split apart, sending great gouts of blood into the already-saturated air.

She gagged on another breath.

The air began to clear as the blood coalesced into a single shimmering sphere at the center of the riders.

Zezili dry-heaved at the churned-up ground.

Above her, the flat sphere expanded into a thin-skinned bubble. Violet light burst from its center. Zezili turned away, blinded.

Her ears popped. The pressure eased.

She wiped at her eyes. Black spots juddered across her vision. Where the bloody bubble had been, a perfect disk of amber sky bled through from… some other place.

Zezili’s stomach heaved again. She vomited. She heard someone laughing and looked up. It was Monshara. She was looking through the hole in the sky.

Zezili didn’t know what she expected. The sky on the other side was a burnished amber, not blue-lavender. The hourglass suns were brilliant crimson, not yellow. The whole horizon glowed red, as if the ground itself emitted some wavering heat. She could not see Para, only a black mass in the sky where Para should have been, and long tails of misty black particles trailing it: the tail of an ebony comet.

The landscape it rained upon was a sea of charred hills. Zezili thought at first it was barren, but then she saw a squat, round tower in the distance, pulsing with a faint blue light.

“Are you coming?” Monshara asked.

Zezili started. “What?”

“Your second can clean things up here,” Monshara said. “My sovereign wishes to meet you, as I’ve said.”

“I can go through?”

“Yes. We’ve ensured that.”

“Ensured it? How?”