The past, it seemed, wasn't done speaking yet.
But neither was the future finished waking up.
Far from Nexera, past the reach of its last satellites and beyond the faintest edge of its mapped space, there was a world no one had named in living memory.
Whatever name it once carried had long ago been eaten—burned, buried, and forgotten beneath ash and claw.
The sky above that world wasn't really a sky at all. It was a thick, constant swirl of grayish-red clouds, so dense that light could barely escape their grip.
They turned endlessly, like a wound that refused to heal. There were no stars visible from below. No moon to track time.
No sun to mark the day from the night. Only a dull, throbbing glow that came from within the planet itself.
Volcanic cracks tore across the surface like veins of molten scar tissue, spilling slow rivers of light that oozed through plains of black stone.
