He coughed, rolled over, and slowly sat up, blinking grit from his eyes.
The world had changed again.
Gray dunes stretched to the horizon, undulating like ocean waves frozen in mid-motion. The sky was not a sky—it was a solid black canvas punctuated by jagged cracks of dull red light. Every few seconds, a soundless flash pulsed through the void, illuminating skeletal ruins half-buried in the ash.
Not the same world. Definitely not.
His limbs trembled. Not from exhaustion, but from the strain of dimensional transit—whatever process had ripped him from one place to another, it had done so without care for biology.
Still, he was alive. That mattered.
“Kalen!” a voice called behind him.
He spun. A woman stumbled toward him through the ash—dark skin coated in soot, wild hair matted with sweat. It took a moment for him to recognize her.
Mira. One of the captives from the pit.
Three others followed. Faces he remembered vaguely from the edge of that hellish crater. They’d been caught in the blast. Now, somehow, they were here too.
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“You—” Mira paused, breathing heavily. “You opened that portal. Didn’t you?”
Kalen shook his head. “Not on purpose. But... yes.”
She stared at him like he was something sacred and terrifying at once.
Before he could respond, the air shifted. A low hum spread through the ash like an electrical charge. The dunes to their left pulsed faintly—then rose.
Something moved beneath the surface.
“Move!” Kalen shouted, pulling Mira to her feet.
The five of them sprinted, stumbling across the unstable terrain. Behind them, the ash erupted, and a chitinous limb—twelve feet long, clawed and blackened—slashed through the space they had just occupied. A creature emerged, like an insect made of molten glass and metal, its limbs warping the air with heat.
The others screamed.
Think. Not just magic. Not just power. Structure.
Kalen looked at the shifting ash, the energy waves, the ripples in light. He didn’t see chaos.
He saw vectors.
He traced them in his mind—forces, angles, energy points. He focused, forced clarity through the fear, and began drawing in his thoughts.
A circle. Simple. Closed.
Not on paper. Not with tools. He imagined it burning onto the core of his being. He traced a path through memory, into instinct, into that strange new awareness he'd felt when watching the "gods" command energy like tyrants of physics.
The symbol clicked into place—not just imagined, but inscribed within his soul.
Something shifted in his chest.
The creature lunged again.
Kalen raised his hand—and a pulse of compressed force exploded outward. Not fire. Not light. Just raw kinetic direction, like a slingshot released.
The creature staggered back, screeched, then vanished into the dunes.
Silence.
The others stared at him.
“What... did you just do?” Mira asked.
Kalen didn’t have the words yet. But in that moment, the Zero Circle shimmered in his soul like a blueprint waiting to grow.
“I built something,” he said, voice quiet. “A system. And we’re going to need it.”