A flicker of light played against his closed eyelids. A flare of incandescent blue appeared and was then gone, leaving darkness in its wake. He turned and pressed his head into the burlap pillow. It could not be morning yet, and he didn’t want to wake up to another day of tilling the fields.

      When we are twelve, Talfani and I will run away and live with the elves in Wildhome. But that was two summers away and now he needed his sleep. Papa would make him work hard in the morning.

      Another flash lit the night and cast sharp shadows on the walls of the small room he shared with his sister. A quick glance across the room to Talfani’s bed showed that she hadn’t stirred in her sleep. Even the worst thunderstorms didn’t wake her.

      Duvan slipped out of his low, bamboo bed, instinctively checked the floor for scorpions and went to the window. “Psst, ’Fani! Wake up! Something’s happening.”

      Outside, the world was transformed. From the window, Duvan could see down the main road of the village. It was a moonless night, which would normally have been black as pitch, but there was a blue fire shimmering in the air.

      Not just the air, in the ground too. Like a thin veil the color of a spider’s weave at midnight, the fabric of the universe fluctuated in front of Duvan’s eyes.

      As he watched from the window, the gossamer knife flickered its way through the left side of the street, and in a moment the adobe houses there were splayed open like cloven fruit. The earth rent in the rift created by the spellplague’s path, mud-brick and dirt flowing up like a inverted waterfall of rock and trees and bamboo into the sky, carrying people with it.