Where Stars Cease to Be

Previously

…She squeezed her eyes shut, clinging to the image of her own world, the familiar cityscape, the rain-slicked streets. When the light subsided, and the cacophony faded, she opened her eyes. The Council chamber was gone. The sterile white walls had dissolved, replaced by the familiar, grimy brick of an alleyway behind her precinct. The scent of ozone was gone, replaced by the exhaust fumes and damp concrete of her own reality. Kaelen was nowhere to be seen. But in her hand, the obsidian shard was cold and inert, its light extinguished. She was home. But the silence that followed was not one of peace, but of profound, unsettling change.