In Heaven, On Earth, In Hell

"What is that?!"

On the top floor of The Hub, an Acolyte who had been run ragged by The Hub's sudden loss of control suddenly caught sight of an anomaly to the southwest. He hurried to the railing and watched everything happening there.

Even from a full sixty kilometers away, that patch of sky, so different from its surroundings, remained striking. The sky looked as if water had been wrung out of it, thick mist linking with the heavens and drooping downward, condensing high in the unreachable air into a vortex as deep as the eye of a storm. Faint thunder and howling wind stirred within the vortex. The dark whirlpool had opened a passage whose end could not be seen, its far side seeming to have long since exceeded the limits of the firmament, leading toward some unknown height.

He remembered that place. It was where Lord Nelson Wiltning, the founder of The Hub, most liked to relax in ordinary times. Many people said he was a bloodthirsty man who loved hunting games, and so he especially liked Auschwitz, that disgusting place that would make anyone who saw it retch. But he, who had once carried messages for Grindelwald, understood that what Nelson liked was only the little pavilion on the hill outside the town. He had once seen Nelson sitting in that pavilion with his own eyes, several brushes pinched in his hand, a blank canvas before him. He did not seem to have any talent for painting; the pigment on the brush tips had dried in the wind, yet he had not put down even a single stroke.

But now, that little pavilion and the hill beneath it were gone. The magnetic poles and gravity of that part of the world seemed to have reversed. A terrifying,