The fall had already started.
Marcus heard it before he saw the collapse, a deep tectonic groan that bypassed his ears and settled into his marrow. The suspended shards drifted through the fissure-light, making the vault groan. Stone was deciding.
The Spire is choosing us, Marcus thought with flat certainty. The mechanical architecture was selecting their party for advancement. He could not yet know that the falling stars were the Spire's code recalibrating to purge them from the system.
The sigil in his palm had become a cold, leaden detonator, fighting to tear itself free of his skin.
"Lysara! Taryn! To the nodes!" He had already called it; the words still hung in the air, but neither woman was in position. The Hounds had surged when the beacon's light cracked, and the perimeter he had held in his head was already a casualty of timing.
He had perhaps four seconds before the first impact.
He kept his eyes on the grid. His ribs ached beneath the leather, but the plaza's pattern mattered more.
He had been mapping the space since the sigil sharpened into a compass: the nodes, the shards suspended in sickly green light, and the angles at which the beacon's fractured light struck the floor. He had not done it on purpose. The layout had accumulated in his mind the way any familiar place eventually became legible.
The house-sized slabs followed the ceiling's node sequence. Nodes failed in sequence, following the floor's energy flow. He could not see the pattern from below, but he could read it in the impacts.
"The nodes are failing in sequence," he said aloud, addressing neither of them. "East to west. The ceiling is coming down in a counterclockwise arc. The impacts are predictable."
Taryn's reply came raw. "What does that mean? Tell me where to go!"
"Thirty paces west. The broken arch. Hit the node at its base when I call it."
She moved without questioning him. Taryn trusted precision in a voice even when she could not follow the reasoning behind it, and precision was the one thing she trusted completely.
"Lysara. The pillar with the carved eye. Open on my word. Redirect the light toward the third shard cluster. Can you hold it for two seconds?"
A pause. Violet ripples opened.
"Yes."
He calculated. The second impact would land twenty degrees farther north than the first, based on the drain through the sigil, the ceiling's slow decay.
The first monolith struck fifty yards east. The shockwave rolled through the obsidian dust, reaching the bones of his feet before the sound. He moved toward the spot the pattern said the second impact would miss.
"Taryn, node!" he called as the second slab fell.
She broke a vial and slammed her palm against the base of the arch. Red energy erupted, igniting the sigil carved into the floor. The second monolith hit the ground, its jagged face catching her flare and redirecting it. Fractured beacon-light caught the slab at the precise angle and scattered upward into the third shard cluster.
"Lysara, now."
The violet aperture opened. Light threaded through it, struck the shard, and refracted down into the rift-crack at the plaza's center.
The fourth monolith fell. The fifth. He called each one without panic. He moved Taryn and Lysara to the positions the pattern demanded. To them, the sky seemed to be ending. To Marcus, it was a sequence resolving itself, and the sequence had an end.
The final monolith crashed with a concussive thud, driving a column of obsidian ash into the air.
Then the beacon's fractured light, redirected through five impacts and Lysara's last portal, hit every node at once.
The plaza went white.
The light was cleaner than an overloaded sigil, the color of a lock opening. A rift-gate tore into the center of the plaza, violet-rimmed and tall as the fallen statues, humming with a frequency Marcus felt in the same place the monoliths had landed: his marrow.
The Hounds were mid-lunge when the gate discharged. Energy erupted without distinguishing between obstacles. The Hounds ceased to exist, their shadow-forms scattering into smoke before they could reform.
The ruins went silent.
Marcus stood at the gate, chest heaving. The sigil had gone quiet since the beacon cracked, an earned silence, the kind that came after something finished its work rather than burned out partway through.
Taryn reached him first. Obsidian soot marked her face, her vials were spent, and the set of her jaw did most of the work of keeping her upright. Lysara followed three steps behind, staff dimmed, her gaze scanning by habit.
Marcus looked at the gate, then at the ruins, then back at the gate.
"Is this the second floor?"
Taryn made a sound halfway between a laugh and a collapse. "Marcus, the Shattered Threshold is Floor One. All of it. What we just survived was the inner trial. The first of several. We've still got a long way to go before we see the sky of Floor Two."
He took that in.
What he had mistaken for Floor One's end was only one trial within it. He thought of everything since waking on this floor: the Hounds, the rift-spawn, the falling sky, the Keeper's riddle. One trial. More to come. On the first floor.
He looked at the blue glow fading from the Shattering-Sigil on his palm.
This place was a patient machine that let its food run.
The rift opened onto deeper dark, and inside it a second set of footprints waited.