The tears closed on the seventh day.
They went quietly, without ceremony or spectacle, the worn fabric of reality slowly knitting itself back together as the conditions that had produced the Thinning shifted according to celestial and magical variables that no shaman fully understood. One by one, the rifts that had opened across the southern plains narrowed, their edges drawing together like wounds healing in accelerated time, the darkness within them fading to a shimmer and then to nothing, until the air where they had been was merely air again, carrying no cold, no wrongness, no trace of the dimension that had pressed against the mortal world through their openings.
