Chapter 18: The Blessing

Light tore through the Badlands like something born. The thin, guttering light of the Morningstar's failing systems was gone, the cold flicker of instruments losing their grip on function. This was a flood — raw, white-gold, pouring through the reversed portal in a torrent that hit the barren dimension the way water hits cracked earth. The void around them shuddered. The vibration moved through her boots, through the deck plating beneath her feet — nothing to do with the ship's engines, which had been dying for the last hour. The dimension itself was reacting. Contracting. The constant pull she'd felt since they'd crossed into this place — that invisible tide dragging everything toward entropy — stuttered, then stuttered again, and for one impossible moment, stopped. The portal blazed. Where it had been a wound — ragged-edged, unstable, a tear between realities that pulled inward and consumed — it was now a doorway. The swirling vortex had resolved into something clean, purposeful, its edges sharp and bright against the void. Source dimension light spilled through it like sunlight through a door thrown open after years of darkness, and it found Prime first. He stood at the threshold with his arms slightly extended, not in any dramatic gesture but in the posture of someone holding a door open with their whole body. Every blue energy channel in his chassis blazed at an intensity Sera had never seen — beyond his designed parameters. The light in him was answering the light pouring through the portal. His dark reflective chassis caught the source dimension's radiance and threw it back in fractured patterns across the deck, across the void, across her. Gold accent lines burned white at their edges. He was the conduit. The first thing the magic had touched when it crossed the threshold,…