Not the calm sort—this was the silence that followed after something enormous was torn apart. No ringing in the ears. No echo. Just... nothing.
He opened his eyes to a sky that wasn’t a sky. A dome of roiling, colorless energy hovered above like oil suspended in light. There were no stars. No sun. Just that dense shimmer, as if reality here were stretched too thin, vibrating on the edge of collapse.
He gasped and immediately regretted it. The air was dense and acrid, thick with charged particles. Breathing it felt like inhaling dust and voltage.
His knees hit hard stone. The ground beneath him was cracked and sharp, laced with dark veins that pulsed a faint bioluminescent blue. Gravity felt inconsistent—lighter one moment, heavier the next.
The experiment. The feedback. The nonlinear spike in the matrix.
I was pulled through.
He knew what had happened, at least in part. A containment failure had overloaded the dimensional isolation field. He had been testing a high-frequency compression ring—a theoretical device capable of locating weakness in spatial membranes.
Apparently, it worked.
But this wasn’t home. This wasn’t even wrong—it was something entirely else. He wasn't just lost. He was unmoored.
Kalen’s mind, even through panic, began cataloging. Observing.
The air density’s wrong. Magnetic pressure’s unstable. Fractal light interference above—possible aetheric layer?
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Not a planet. A pocket reality. Self-contained. Primitive structure. Artificial decay?
He stood shakily and turned to survey the landscape. Spires of obsidian jutted from the ground like broken teeth. In the distance, metallic ruins stood half-buried in sand that glowed faintly with entropy. No plants. No wind. Only the low thrum of a world that had given up.
Then came the scream.
Human. Sharp. Raw. Somewhere below.
He crept toward the edge of a crumbling plateau, ducking behind jagged stone. What he saw sent ice down his spine.
A wide pit, circular and deep, carved into the earth like a crater. At its center, dozens of human figures—gaunt, filthy, shackled—knelt with heads bowed. Surrounding them stood towering figures clad in living armor, their movements too fluid, too precise. No mouths. No voices. But when one raised its arm, a wave of invisible force snapped a prisoner backward like a ragdoll.
They called them gods.
Kalen’s instincts rejected the word immediately. There was no mysticism in the way they moved, no aura of divine justice. Only control. Enforcement. An ancient system of domination that mimicked divinity for efficiency.
Energy manipulation without devices. No visible catalysts. Not psychic—too precise.
That means it's systemic. Structured. And if it's structured…
He felt it—deep in his bones. That glimmer of idea. That itch at the back of his mind where patterns lived. These beings weren’t casting miracles. They were using a mechanism. A logic.
And if there was logic, there was a key.
Kalen withdrew slowly, heart hammering but thoughts racing. He didn't have tools. He didn't have power. But he had something better.
A system can be unraveled. If it can be defined, it can be rewritten.
Not magic. Not worship.
A language. A new branch of physics.
Wizardry.
He stared up at the fractured sky. The light rippled. Somewhere, something cracked—louder than thunder, and closer.
And then the world blinked.
A ripple of force burst outward from the pit. Space itself twisted. The ground beneath him lurched as if rejecting his presence. Geometric shapes spiraled behind his vision, invisible to the eye but screaming in his mind.
An equation. No—an event.
Kalen felt his body compress and stretch in the same instant. Every bone buzzed. The air folded.
And then he fell again.
Into another world.