The lower decks of Elysion station were filled with the sharp scent of oil, metal, and static electricity. Twenty-seven-year-old Stela Vorn barely noticed the faint blue veins on her left arm—the strange patterns she had inherited from her Lumin ancestry, whose meaning she never understood—as she plunged them into the tangled guts of an Omni-Droid. Outside, the artificial daylight seeping through the slits in the titanium shutters turned floating dust motes into golden specks. This was her home: where she got lost among the scrap, forgotten space junk, and malfunctioning tech that only she could fix. The warning from the portable holoprojector—"Aether Gate: Critical Stability Loss!"—flickered before her eyes. A nameless mechanic, she thought with a bitter pang. Just someone who holds the pieces together.
Then, the world shattered.
It wasn't a tremor. It was a rupture. Light rained down from the ceiling; lightning in shades of violet and electric blue licked the walls, melting metal. The blue veins on Stela's wrists suddenly glowed like embers, and she screamed in pain. Alien images stormed her mind: Crystal towers gleaming under twin suns… The hum of a desert wind… And then, a bone-chilling scream. The fabric of reality was tearing like cloth. The Stormgate Event had begun.
As she ran, Elysion's familiar grey corridors warped. Titanium floors melted, giving way to the phosphorescent, dancing mists of the In-Between. This was neither space nor time; it was a sea of nothingness where the laws of physics died and matter turned fluid like a dream. Her breath caught. As an energy wave hurled her, she reached out on instinct – a silvery, vibrating beam shot from her fingertips and vaporized a massive beam crashing down on her.
"No!" Stela moaned, staring at her hands in shock and terror. Did I do that?
A silhouette emerged from the shadows. A man with a hardened jaw, a soldier's posture, and eyes that held the mark of deep experience—and a familiar fear. The collar of his coat was turned up. It was Rais Dorran. He pulled her roughly behind a pile of debris, his voice razor-sharp: "Don't look back! That gate opened because of you, Vorn. What's following you… brings things worse than death."
Stela resisted, her eyes darting to her glowing wrists: "Who am I to–" "You,"Rais cut her off, his gaze locked on Stela's burning veins, "are the one the In-Between called. And now…" As reality shattered like a mirror behind them, his voice roared: "It's time to go!"
The ancient-looking device on Rais's wrist flared. An Aether Gate—a maelstrom resembling a black hole, but with shards of severed memories and futures that never were dancing within it—opened in the void before them. Stela turned for one last look: Elysion station was dissolving as if acid had been poured onto a painting, the familiar rusty brown of the scrapyard replaced by the In-Between's eerie neon greens and deep space purples. Two realities were merging in a deadly dance.
Rais pushed her.
The fall… was endless. She was falling into a void, a nothingness, an everything. And Stela Vorn—the scrapyard mechanic, the lost hybrid, the unaware weapon—found herself for the first time in the cold, living darkness of the In-Between. Beyond the shattering horizons of reality, the secrets of her past and the shadows threatening her future lay in wait. She heard Rais following her, his voice swallowed by the whirlpool's roar: "Survive, Stela! You're beginning to understand!"
The darkness swallowed them. Answers and greater questions awaited beyond the fractured horizons.