The crack above the table had been two inches wide. Now it was four, and it had not stopped there. Beorn no longer expected it to stop on its own.

The lamp was out. The oil still sat in the reservoir, but whatever interaction had happened at the midpoint had taken what the flame needed. The only light in the room came through the crack.

It was an erratic glow. It struck the room at a slant that matched nothing, and the shadows it made disagreed with one another in ways that made the space hard to read.

The fractures in the left wall had multiplied. The six-inch hairline crack had split into secondary breaks along the mortar lines, uneven and jagged, following the weakest paths through the stone.

Aestrith’s feet were planted hard on the stone floor. Her breathing was marked, and the pallor of constant high output was evident.

Across the room, the figure with the fallen hood and the flat brown eyes was in the same state, her hands still extended, her face carrying the same strain Aestrith’s did. Both had passed the point where choice mattered. Now they were managing the consequence.

Beorn stayed in his chair because it felt risky to attempt any movement.

Above the high quarter, the Scar drew inward along the fault line the fracture had opened beneath it. The membrane pulled toward the stress point the way surface tension pulled toward a rupture. It was unlike anything else.

Aestrith felt it first. Both of her hands shifted in a small correction, the motion of someone whose footing had changed and then found itself again. Her feet reset. She did not speak.

The crack answered. Six inches. Then eight. It spread with the steady pace of something failing under constant pressure.

The papers the field had pressed against the ceiling dropped in sections, then lifted again in a cycle. The correspondence case slid off the table and hit the stone. Three cracks now, where the fracture in the left wall had carried one before.

Beorn looked at the crack. Then at Aestrith. Then at the midpoint, where the interference had gone beyond what either woman could manage and beyond what the room had been built to contain.

The shockwave moved through them instead of air, through the stone of the floor and the table and the chairs and every surface in the room, reaching everywhere at once.

Beorn’s view to his chair and the floor lost perspective for half a second. When it returned, he was falling sideways, his shoulder striking stone first and then the side of his head striking it immediately after, fast and cold.

He heard the chair scrape. He heard Coss hit the passage wall. He heard two sets of footsteps moving very fast.

Then nothing.

The light from the crack was everything.

He was present without being located. The floor was absent, the walls were absent, and the light filling the space had no source in any direction because it came from every direction at once and cast no shadows.

He observed these facts in order, the way he moved through a ledger, recording before asking what they meant. His own presence filled the space the way heat filled a room, diffuse and without a single point of origin, everywhere it reached.

The beings were present in the same way. He became aware of them the same way he had become aware of the Scar’s pressure at distance, first gradually, then all at once, until he could not remember their absence.

The more he noticed them, the more there was to notice. Scale behaved badly here. Something at the corner of his awareness that seemed small would increase, when he focused on it, into something as wide as a warehouse wall.

Between one glance and the next, their form did not hold together. Something different occupied the place each time, with no continuity between the states.

Their attention toward him, though, was stable. That was the one fixed thing in the space.

The pressure came in. The Scar had created, at a distance, a faint sense of being watched from a different direction, a suggestion that didn’t match when it was held in view.

What reached him here was that sensation at close range and full strength, the feeling of being too small for the world, pressed from every side by a dimension and strangeness that did not belong to his kind.

It was much stronger. He noted that as information about what they are and kept watching them.

"Good day. I’m afraid I came in uninvited." he said into the space.

He did not know whether the space had language. He used it because it was the only way available. The pressure increased. He took that as a reply.

"If you don’t mind to send me back? Or perhaps we could attempt a conversation."

The dimension around him had begun to behave differently from the surrounding space. He was saturated with this world’s abstract framework, and the longer he remained, the more the area around him turned toward those laws. The beings were built for the rules of this space, and the zone of his presence was overwriting them.

Near what was the surface of one being, flesh, muscles and skin developed that didn’t fit its existence. The existence was torn apart in a concept it did not fit. More expanded over it, the grotesque noise of tissue split apart, the color and consistency of blood, before the space collapsed and the being withdrew.

The others pulled back with it. The pressure around him eased.

The key fact was clear. He was the reason. His presence, saturated with this world’s reality inside a space not built for it, created the effect. Being there was doing it.

Then he saw a light arriving from one direction, one he had no direction before. The fracture’s wrong-slant illumination, the only light in the space that matched anything he recognized, could now be read as a direction.

He moved toward it.

The beings did not follow.

Then the floor was under him.

Cold stone. Hard. At the side of his head, where the impact had been made. He was face-down. He turned.

Blood from his head had run down his temple to the stone beside him and left a dark mark on the floor.

Aestrith was on the floor beside him. Both hands held the sides of his face, checking his head the way you checked for wounds when the answer mattered immediately.

Her face was doing something it did not normally do. The composure she wore as a working posture had broken, and what stood in its place was the look of who had watched something happen and could not stop it, then had spent the silence afterward wallowing up the guilt.

"Beorn," she said.

There was something in it her voice did not usually carry.

She pulled him forward and held him there, tighter than the situation required, longer than she would normally have allowed herself. Her arms had a strong grip.

He felt the exhaustion of the magical clash in how she held him, and saw the pallor of it in the skin at her cheek, and the other way that had been briefly unguarded in how she held him.

Then she pulled back. Her hands went to the wound at the side of his head, pressing at it with her sleeve in a way that was practical and impersonal and covered what the last few seconds had been.

"Don’t scare me like that again," she said.

He looked at the room.

The crack in the air above where the table had been was still open. Ten inches, maybe twelve. The diffused glow still came through it at a slant that matched nothing in the room. The table was against the far wall. The chairs were on their sides.

The correspondence case lay on the stone with its seal broken. The room ha the two of them and nothing else. Both the figure and Coss were gone.

He was still bleeding.