… The air is wrong. It’s choking me and burning the back of my throat. Ash is floating fat as snowflakes. Did I even worldjump?
I had Captain Leto’s men build my pyre far from the walls of Salem. In the world I am trying to get to there is no need for the wall anymore, and from my spirit walks with the shaman I have seen this other Salem is substantially different from the one I live in. I’ve learned that when I worldjump I end up in the exact location I left—only in a different universe—and if I were to worldjump from the top of the wall or from the fireplace in my rooms at the Citadel, I might appear inside a piece of furniture or forty feet in the air. The only safe place to worldjump is from the ground, and even then it’s still dangerous. You never really know what dangers await when you cross the worldfoam.
Leto had been reluctant to set my pyre so far outside of Salem. He worried about the Woven, but what I couldn’t tell him is that where I was going, there would be no Woven in the woods to fear. I didn’t want to promise too much in case the shaman was wrong. Leto and his soldiers are from Walltop. From their vantage, they’ve seen more of the evils of the Woven than have any other citizens of the Thirteen Cities and have more reason to want them eradicated. More reason to fear them.
I sit up. There’s no flame under me. That means I’m not on the pyre anymore. I look around. There’s nothing but charred ground and blasted trees as far as I can see into the murky distance. The air isn’t just acrid. On the elemental level it roils with huge particles. Damaging ones. They tear through my cells, wreaking havoc.
I’m in the wrong world. One of the cinder worlds. I knew it would be dangerous to worldjump without a lighthouse, but I did it anyway. Rowan says I never listen to anyone, but what choice did I have?
I don’t have time to panic. I stand up and run to the trees. I need to build another pyre to fuel a worldjump and get myself out of this dead place. When my hand touches the trunk of the first tree, the bark crumbles in my hand and falls through my fingers like the dried-out walls of an old sand castle. The next tree is the same. And the next. What caused this? The huge particles I see on the elemental level, destroying the life-helix? If so, what caused them? It’s almost as if the surface of the sun had reached across the void of space and grazed this planet, scouring it of life.
I scan the horizon for Salem. I see the walls, but they aren’t the right shape. There must be something wrong with my vision. I squint, trying to understand what I see before me. The walls are not in the process of being pulled down because they are no longer needed, like I saw on the world that got rid of the Woven. Here, the wall is just a useless tumble of rocks and judging from the angle of the stones, it looks as if they’d been blown down by a fearsome wind. No greentowers soar behind the walls nor can I see the spires of the Citadel. I look at where they should be, but they’re simply not there. I stagger closer, unable to take my eyes off the ruin that was my city. It’s nothing but rubble and ash. No hurricane, no matter how great, could have done this and there’s no explosion I know of big enough to cause such total destruction.