He nods.
One, Two, Three.
We leap.
The light swallows us before impact. Obsidian shards vanish behind. The rumble warps. Time stretches like silk tearing. Our bodies pull, stretch, vanish.
Flash.
Then nothing.
When the world returns, I don’t know where we are. My lungs burn. My head spins. White light bathes me. Metal hums. The air tastes sterile, new, alien.
Kyldak is there—alive. I see him first. The portal’s edges behind us shimmer. I stagger toward him, knees quivering.
He catches me. Arms tight. “You okay?” he breathes.
I nod, voice shaking. “I think so.”
We stand in a chamber unlike any ruin. Walls smooth, glowing glyphs unfamiliar. The portal behind us sizzles. We stare.
A quiet hush. Our warband emerges, blinking, battered but alive.
I look at Kyldak. He looks at me. Relief, awe, terror swirl in his eyes.
I press a hand to his face. “We made it,” I whisper.
He nods. “Yes. We did.”
But underneath, something else hums. The device behind us pulses. The air vibrates. The portal remains open. The machine didn’t die. We tethered life to it.
I swallow, heart pounding. The weight of what we did begins to land.
We step forward—together—into the new world waiting.
I wake to the sound of rain.
Real rain — not acid fog, not sand-laced drizzle — the kind that smells like iron and sky.
It’s cold against my face, trickling through the cracks in my hair and down my neck.
For a long moment, I just lie there, breathing, not daring to open my eyes in case this is another cruel hallucination conjured by hypoxia or trauma.
The ground beneath me isn’t stone or glass. It’s metal. Slick, grooved, trembling faintly under weight and machinery. There’s the hum of turbines somewhere distant. The steady beeping of medtech.
A voice. Too clear, too real to belong to the dead.
“—stabilize them, now! They’re alive, I’ve got pulses on both!”
I blink my eyes open. The light hits hard — white, clinical flood beams washing across an industrial landing field. Above me, clouds churn, heavy with stormlight.
The taste of oxygen is too clean. Too Earth.
My lungs burn when I try to sit up. Hands catch me — gloved, gentle but firm. The medics. Their suits gleam white under the floodlamps, each with the EarthFleet insignia glowing blue on the arm.
Someone’s pressing a cold disc against my temple; another fastens sensors to my wrists. I see the tremor in my own hands. Not from fear — from shock.
Then I turn my head, and the rest of the world narrows to one impossible sight.
