Chapter 1: Next Steps

Equations covered the walls in faded ink, layered over one another where the surface had run out. Some had been scratched through and rewritten in tighter script beside the original, corrections made years apart in handwriting that drifted from precise to shaking and back again. The oldest were barely visible beneath newer work, ghost mathematics haunting the station like the memory of a thought someone refused to let die. Sera stood in the middle of her father's research station and let the silence after his words settle into her bones. Magic is dying. Someone is making it happen. The station hummed around her. Not mechanical vibration — something deeper, a resonance that hit her sternum before it reached her ears. The dimensional barrier itself, thrumming through every surface, every jury-rigged panel of solidified magic that Marcus had shaped into walls and floors and something resembling a life. Through the viewport to her left, the source dimension stretched in impossible colors: rivers of liquid magic flowing in slow luminous currents between platforms of crystallized energy that floated in the void like islands in an ocean made of light. Beautiful. Alien. The dimension that was slowly eating her father alive. She turned from the viewport. The station was small — a single room partitioned by habit rather than walls. Marcus's living space occupied the far corner: a cot with a blanket folded at its foot, the fabric so threadbare it had gone translucent at the creases. A mug with a chipped rim sat on a shelf beside three others, all identical, as if he'd salvaged a set and broken them one by one over the years. Odds and ends she'd never know the stories behind — a coil of wire twisted into a shape that might have been decorative or might have…