I'm frozen in some sort of paralysis. Everyone else around me is too. For some reason, I can't draw my attention away from the overwhelming presence taking up the hole in reality. It feels like the air just before a thunderstorm hits.

A tendril of something pokes experimentally through the hole, waving around almost curiously. It withdraws, and then an obsidian glass arm pulls itself the wrong way through, shoulder stump emerging first, then elbow, then hand. The motion is so wrong I want to vomit, and pressure starts building behind my eyes. A head inverts itself into existence, made of that same glossy black material and bearing a perfectly blank expression. A body scuttles through next, faceted outer ribs acting like legs until they fold away like they were always inside it.

Another arm. A leg. Another leg. Everything is together and it's never been separate.

A ten meter tall woman made entirely of obsidian glass stands like a statue in the middle of the base, and still no one moves. Her head is now facing every direction at once, a blurring cloud of features drifting across and within the polished material. I can feel blood leaking from my ears. Her arms are now raised, no motion in between changes of state, and the distorted gray nothingness surrounding us vanishes.

A threat zone, so lurid as to be almost blinding, blankets the entire area. Up above, the stars warp and twist, a whirlpool lens funneling a diamond spear that grows larger and larger as it descends. Screaming choirs dance along its brilliant flanks, but their light stays confined within the thrusting pillar.

I want to move. I can't move. I want to breathe. I can't breathe.

The obsidian woman takes a step without stepping. Her body unfolds into an infinite flower, then collapses back in on itself. Her size doubles.

She takes another step. Another unfolding. Another doubling. The diamond spear shudders against the sky, but its motion doesn't take it anywhere. Distance is a concept it no longer possesses.

Another step. Another.

The sound of her unseen footfall is beyond deafening. I want to collapse to my knees. I can't move.

I'm staring at a titan striding the earth. Her body rises into the sky so far it fades into the night, visible only where it occludes the stars, but the stars are still there, they're just inside her. Another diamond lance appears, and another, but they fail to find their way down, and stick next to the first. A hand larger than the mountain we stand on reaches down and digs into the earth in a quaking tremble. Rock screams, and then she pulls the mountain skyward, tearing it in half, Fishhook's curved peak poking out above her fist.

The ground jumps back and forth beneath me, a violent earthquake that's completely still. Two-thirds of the Marauder base is gone, engulfed in that mammoth grip, the empty night air hovering bare meters away from my feet but I still can't move. I can't think. I can't exist, but somehow I am.

Midnight fingers squeeze the sundered earth like clay, molding Fishhook into its namesake. Another hand reaches for the diamond pillars. When it returns, it's holding an endless coil of glittering line. Fishhook is threaded.

Fishhook is cast.

Fishhook bites deep.

The glittering line drags something down from the stars, twitching and jerking as whatever's on the other end bucks and thrashes. It feels like no time has passed. It feels like days have passed, my mind witnessing the sun rising and falling thrice over. I'm dying of thirst. No time has passed at all.

Suddenly, a massive wedge of grey and black is hovering kilometers above us, the mountain peak impaled through its front third. Blazing energy flares from its rear, but it's pinned to the sky in defiance of everything real. The obsidian woman swings her right hand at it, glacially slow, like someone swatting a fly over the course of a week. Just before the hand makes contact, a wrenching twist of purple force from the side of the wedge unfolds it into its fractal flower shape, and when the hand collapses back, three fingers are missing.

The obsidian woman screams, the universe starts up again, and just like that, I can move.

Chaos erupts.

SKY RUN NOW!