The Vigilant bucked violently as it plunged deeper into the atmosphere, clouds boiling around the hull like ghostly hands. Kael braced himself against the command chair as alarms flickered red and gold across the bridge.
"Stabilizers failing!" Ryn shouted over the roar. "Something's interfering with the descent protocols!"
"Override!" Kael snapped.
"I'm trying—Kael, it's overriding me back."
The ship wasn't falling.
It was being pulled.
Outside the viewports, lightning stitched the sky in jagged, unnatural lines. Not random strikes—patterns. Circles, spirals, symbols etched in raw electricity. Each flash illuminated glimpses of the surface below: towering crystalline spires erupting through forests, luminous rivers cutting through dead cities, metallic growths spreading like vines across continents.
Earth had changed.
It was still changing.
Another whisper brushed Kael's mind—gentler this time, almost comforting.
Don't fight it. You're meant to see.
His father's voice.
Kael clenched his jaw. "Get us control. Now."
Ryn slammed her palm against the emergency panel, causing the manual systems to surge online with a guttural hum.
"I've got partial thrusters! I can slow us, but I can't stop whatever's pulling—"
The ship lurched downward as if caught by a giant hand.
Ryn grabbed Kael's arm, fear flickering across her features. "Kael… something down there wants us."
He met her gaze. "Then we find out what."
A deafening boom shook the hull. The screens flared white. Then suddenly—quiet.
The turbulence vanished.
The Vigilant drifted forward in perfect stillness, suspended inside a colossal vortex of clouds. At the center hovered a structure unlike anything the old Earth ever built: a floating monolith, kilometers wide, spiraling with crystalline threads of light. It pulsed with slow, deliberate rhythm.
Ryn exhaled shakily. "Is that… a Continuum tower?"
"No," Kael whispered. "The towers were anchored to the ground."
"Then what is it?"
Kael stepped closer to the glass.
The monolith rotated gently, and for a moment he swore he saw shapes within the light—shadows moving, faces blurring together like figures behind frosted glass. Billions of faint silhouettes whispering across the surface.
Not dead.
Not gone.
Waiting.
Then a pulse of energy rippled outward from the structure.
The Vigilant shuddered, its systems freezing mid-operation.
Ryn cursed. "We've lost everything! Engines, power, comms—Kael, we're dead in the water!"
The ship floated helplessly toward the monolith's core. A soft glow rose ahead of them, forming a doorway of shimmering white. Every instinct Kael had screamed to pull away, to fight, to flee.
Instead he whispered, "Father…?"
The glow intensified in response.
Come home.
Ryn turned to him, eyes wide. "Kael—who are you talking to?"
He swallowed hard.
"To someone who shouldn't be alive."
The glow engulfed the Vigilant.
And the ship slipped into the light.