The ink smelled of soot and regret.
Dr. Elena Vasquez—or rather, the girl now called Lina—dipped her quill, the scratching sound on cheap parchment a fresh torment. In her old life, the loudest sound in her lab was the whisper-quiet hum of a quantum supercomputer cooling itself. Here, in this damp, candle-lit cell she called a room, every noise was an organic intrusion: the drip of water through stone, the distant clang of the smithy's hammer, the gnawing of a rat in the walls.
Three months. Three months since the catastrophic failure of the Vazquez-Cheng Particle Bridge had torn a hole in spacetime and flung her consciousness across dimensions. She'd woken up here, in Aethermoor, trapped in the emaciated body of a recently deceased scribe, her own memories a phantom limb that ached with the loss of everything she'd ever known.
Her body was weak, her status nonexistent, and her knowledge of quantum mechanics was as useful as a textbook in a cage of monkeys.
Here, they didn't have science. They had magic.
And it was an abomination.
Pushing back from the rickety desk, Lina rubbed her tired eyes. The guild master wanted fifty pages of trade law transcribed by sunrise. Her fingers were stained black, her back a knot of pain. This wasn't a life; it was a punishment. Hell, she'd decided, wasn't fire and brimstone. It was mediocrity and powerlessness.
A commotion from the cobbled street below drew her to the grimy window. A crowd had gathered around a street performer, a mage in a tattered blue robe. He was chanting, his arms waving in elaborate, pointless patterns.
"Behold!" he cried, his voice thin. "The Ever-Burning Flame!"
He thrust his hands forward. A ball of fire sputtered into existence, wobbling in the air like a soap bubble. It was dim, smoky, and flickered out after a few seconds. The crowd offered a smattering of polite, unimpressed applause.
Lina scoffed. Inefficient. She'd seen it a hundred times. Magic in this world was a messy, brutish affair. It relied on ritual, emotion, and incomprehensible verbal commands. It was like trying to perform surgery with a sledgehammer.
But then, she saw it. The thing she alone could see.
It had started a week after she arrived, a faint shimmer at the edge of her vision. Now, it was a constant overlay on reality. Where others saw a flickering flame, Lina saw a chaotic tangle of shimmering, probabilistic threads. Billions of them, vibrating with potential. The mage's spell had crudely yanked a handful of these threads, twisting them into a knot of collapsed certainty—a temporary, unstable manifestation of heat and light.
It was quantum physics.
It was sloppy, uncontrolled, brute-force quantum manipulation, but it was there. The underlying code of the universe was visible to her, and these mages were fumbling with it like children trying to write a symphony by banging on a piano.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic rhythm of hope and terror. This was it. This was her way out. She wasn't powerless. She was the only person in this entire backwards world who could actually read the source code.
Ignoring the ache in her bones, she rushed back to her desk, her transcription forgotten. She grabbed a spare piece of parchment and a fresh quill. The mage's chant had been nonsense, a collection of guttural sounds she couldn't replicate. But the chant wasn't the important part. It was just a focusing tool, a crude key. The real command was in the intent, in the way he'd shaped the quantum foam.
She'd seen the pattern. A simple seven-node sequence. A command to excite local energy particles. The verbal component was just a… a password. And passwords could be bypassed.
Her hands trembled as she sketched the matrix she'd seen in her mind's eye. Not with ink, but with will. She closed her eyes, focusing on the inkwell on her desk. She didn't want fire; that was too complex, too dangerous for a first attempt. She just wanted a simple demonstration of force. A proof of concept.
She visualized the threads of reality connected to the pool of black liquid. She didn't chant. She didn't wave her hands. She simply… wrote the command. She pictured the sequence, the precise way the threads should be braided to defy the local gravitational constant. It was like debugging a program. Clean. Logical. Efficient.
Isolate target object. Define vector. Apply force.
She opened her eyes.
For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened. The ink remained still. A bitter wave of despair washed over her. Of course. It was a delusion, a symptom of a traumatized mind trying to find order in chaos. She was just a scribe named Lina, and she would die in this miserable, damp room.
Then, a single drop of ink quivered. It elongated, pulling itself from the surface of the well. Another joined it, then another. A sphere of black liquid, shimmering and perfect, lifted silently into the air, hovering an inch above the desk.
Lina stared, breathless. A wild, triumphant laugh escaped her lips. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated intellectual victory. It worked. The universe had laws, and she, Dr. Elena Vasquez, knew how to break them.
The euphoria was so intoxicating, she didn't notice the sudden drop in temperature. She didn't see the candlelight flicker and dim. She didn't feel the presence until it was right behind her.
The air itself seemed to curdle. A shape coalesced in the darkest corner of the room—a figure woven from static and shadow, a human-shaped distortion in reality. It had no face, only a void where features should be.
A voice whispered, chilling her to the bone. It wasn't just a sound; it was an echo in her mind, a ghost from the life she'd lost. It was the voice of her dead brother, Daniel. The brother who had died in a car crash two years before her own experiment had killed her.
"We chose you for a reason, Elena," it whispered, the sound a perfect, soul-shattering replica of him.
"The storm is coming."