The green ship continued speeding toward Nexera, but inside… it was anything but calm.
From the outside, it looked serene, vast, and beautiful even. Its hull was shaped from living wood and ancient materials that had weathered countless journeys through star streams.
To anyone watching from a distance, the Verdant Star looked like a drifting miracle, a piece of forest plucked from some forgotten world and sent sailing across the void. It gave off no violent bursts of flame or roar of engines, just a steady green glow that made it seem almost asleep.
But the moment someone stepped through its hull, the illusion of simplicity broke. It became clear normal rules of space or matter did not shape this ship.
The outer hull was only a skin. Beneath it, space itself had folded, stretched, rewritten.
Inside, the Verdant Star was an entire world.
