As Kass rose and the town and desert became visible over the roofs of the temple, she would see that no roofs had yet fallen in, and many townsfolk were rushing out of their doors. The orchard trees vibrated actively, casting down premature olives and figs and dates into the surrounding soil. The River of Shadows rippled like a rough sea, sloshing back and forth over its reedy banks, and the curvature of the ripples bowed westward - suggesting an epicenter to the east, almost like a giant stone had been thrown in the water there.<br/><br/>The view of Mount Goldflail, almost a dozen miles away over flat open sands, would suggest the same, for the fact that the effects of the tectonic activity there was visible at all from this multi-mile distance suggested it was far stronger. An avalanche like the one Kass and Aria had avoided was underway, and several of the new narrow cracks in the rock face were widening.<br/><br/>Aria launched herself into the air a moment after Kass, glancing around, then alternately eastward or downward, the statue still well in telekinesis range.<br/><br/>From the nearest spur of Goldflail an avalanche changed character - it seemed less like boulders were tumbling individually down the rockface, and more like the face itself was shearing away and sliding down. It seemed to break like a dropped stone tablet, then an adjacent face of the spur fell away.<br/><br/>Then the spur, though breaking and raining down, seemed also to<em>rise</em>and fall away. A humming sound filled the sky, low and distant, a vibrating sound of an almost subsonic pitch that a person could hear in the vibrations of their own chest cavity.<br/><br/>The spur rose from the mountain - and at a constant acceleration, the physical trajectory of something falling, except<em>up</em>. Rock continued to shear and fall away, back to the sand...but some boulders, midfall, abruptly changed direction and seemed to fall<em>up</em>as if seeking in vain to catch up with the underside of the spur.<br/><br/>Soon all the stone had seemingly fallen away from its initial state as part of the spur - all that was left, aside from clouds of debris falling down around a column falling impossibly<em>upward</em>, was a glistening black pyramid, a few hundred feet across and comprised perhaps of smooth obsidian, levitating hundreds of feet in the sky.<br/><br/>Another wave of humming echoed across the sky. The falling-upward pyramid decelerated, and the rocks directly beneath it and falling upward stalled with a smooth trajectory, and then began to fall downwards again. They struck the sand and what was left of the mountain spur, a jagged gap like a missing or broken tooth, with a great cacophony of crashing.<br/><br/>The pyramid itself kept an altitude as constant as a lilypad floating on a still lake, eight hundred feet perhaps above the sand, and it began to float west.<br/><br/><br/><br/>6 days elapsed (rolled a d10) - so Aria's done with her book (with 1 day to spare, since the 'lunch' day was her 2nd, i.e. done day before yesterday)