Three weeks had passed since the Inkless Realm fell silent.
Maya Chen pressed her palm against the observation deck's reinforced glass, watching the city below shimmer with the strange stability that had settled over everything after the great narrative wars ended. No more reality storms. No more fragments dissolving mid-conversation. No more refugees from collapsed dimensions stumbling through downtown streets, their existence flickering between states like broken holograms.
Everything was... normal. Suspiciously, unnaturally normal.
"Status report," she called to her team, not turning away from the window. As Lead Coordinator of the Balance Zone Monitoring Division, she'd grown accustomed to the weight of watching over the spaces where different realities intersected. But lately, that weight felt different. Heavier. Like something was pressing against the boundaries of existence itself, testing for weak points.
