The blue tractor beam violently cut off, and gravity remembered them with a vengeance.
Elara and Lucien dropped twenty feet through the absolute dark, crashing heavily onto a grid of freezing, metallic bars. The impact rattled Elara's teeth and knocked the breath right out of her lungs. She rolled onto her side, coughing violently as she inhaled the air. It tasted completely wrong, sterile, dry, and smelling heavily of burnt wires and old, dried blood.
She reached inward, searching for her connection to the earth, but there was nothing. The warm, comforting hum of the forest and the massive, pulsing heart of the Leviathan were totally gone. She was entirely cut off, marooned inside a dead metal sky.
"Elara! Don't move," Lucien gasped. He was already dragging himself over to her, his breath catching painfully in his throat as his armor scraped against the grating. "Are you whole? Did anything split?"
