The pull back to the Between was gentler than the pull in — a slow settling instead of a sudden fall — and when the gold light finally gave way to the familiar colorless gray, Ash was still staring down at the stone in his hand like he half expected it to vanish the moment he stopped watching it.
"What is it?" Maren asked, crouching beside him.
"I don't know." He turned it over, carefully, the way you'd handle something you already suspected mattered more than you understood. "It's warm. It shouldn't be warm. Nothing here is warm except — " he glanced up at her, and didn't finish the sentence, didn't need to.
The tremor started small.
Maren felt it first as a shiver up through her knees, the ground itself flexing like something enormous had just shifted its weight somewhere very far below them. Then it built — not violently, not at first, just a low, deep groan of a world that had never once, in either of their experience, made a sound like this.
"Ash." Her voice had gone tight. "Ash, is that — is that the stone?"
He was already on his feet, stone clenched tight in one fist, the other hand reaching instinctively for hers. "I don't know. I don't know, I've never — "
The tremor sharpened into something closer to a wave, visible now, rippling out across the flat gray horizon in every direction, cracking the ground into jagged, glowing seams that looked, for one terrifying second, like the world itself was coming apart at every stitch that had ever held it together — and then, just as suddenly, the seams sealed themselves shut behind the wave as it passed, leaving nothing behind but faint, settling dust.
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Maren realized, with a lurch of something between relief and deep unease, that she hadn't felt any of it. Not the ground splitting, not the impossible violence of a world tearing open around her. She'd seen it happen. She hadn't felt so much as a flicker of pain.
"It's not hurting anyone," she said slowly. "Look — there." Other silhouettes, scattered across the distance, standing untouched in the middle of ground that had just, visibly, catastrophically broken open beneath their feet. Some hadn't even noticed. "The Between doesn't let its own souls feel this. It's — it's protecting us. From whatever that stone just did."
"That's not comforting," Ash said, "given that I'm the one holding it."
She almost laughed — the reflex was there, halfway up her throat, the particular gallows humor of two people standing in the middle of an impossible earthquake that couldn't hurt them — and then she felt something else arrive on the wind, something that had nothing to do with the tremor at all.
Attention. Vast, hungry, deliberate attention, converging on their exact patch of gray from every direction at once.
"Ash," she said, all the humor gone out of her voice in an instant. "Ash, something's coming."
He didn't ask what. He didn't have to. He could feel it too, now — a pressure in the air that had nothing to do with the storm under his own skin and everything to do with something else's storm, several of them, closing in fast.
"Whatever that stone is," he said, low, urgent, already positioning himself half a step in front of her without seeming to notice he'd done it, "I don't think we're the only ones who can feel it."
The gray horizon in every direction began, all at once, to bend.