The stars burned like cold fire outside the viewport. Commander Elena Varga pressed her gloved hand against the reinforced glass, as if she could touch them—just once, without the prison of steel and silence.
"Telemetry stable. Course holding," came the calm voice of Dr. Arun Das from navigation. He never raised his tone, not even when they were climbing through Earth's atmosphere strapped to a bomb of fire.
Elena smiled faintly. That's why he's here. We need someone who believes equations can tame the universe.
Seven souls in a machine built for four. The Odyssey wasn't designed to carry this many, but politics and desperation had twisted science into spectacle. Seven faces, seven names, seven dreams—the whole world watching them reach for the stars.
A voice cut through her earpiece. "Commander, you seeing that?" It was Sergeant Marcus Hale, the mission's military attaché, more comfortable with rifles than rockets.
She turned. Out beyond the black horizon, something pulsed. Not a star, not a planet, not even a satellite. A wound in space itself. It shimmered violet, rippling like water yet burning with the weight of suns.
"I'm… registering nothing," Arun said, his calm finally cracking. "Sensors say it doesn't exist."
Yet it grew.
The cabin lights flickered. Static crackled through their headsets. The pilot, Yelena Kovac, swore in Russian and yanked at controls that no longer responded.
"Brace!"
The violet light erupted. It wasn't a beam. It was a hand.
It caught the Odyssey like a toy, dragging it through a hole in the stars. Metal shrieked. Gravity became meaningless. Elena felt her stomach tear away from her spine, her blood boiling, her vision fracturing into shards of impossible color.
For an instant—just one—she saw something beyond the rift. Towers made of bone. A sky of red suns. Rivers that bled light instead of water.
Then came the fall.
The Odyssey burned through an alien sky, ripped apart, scattering flame and screaming metal across a land of forests and mountains.
One by one, seven lives were hurled from the heavens, cast down into a world where magic ruled and steel decided fate.
When Elena awoke, coughing blood onto alien grass, the stars she had once commanded were gone. Above her stretched a sky with two moons. And around her, shadows moved—armored men, blades drawn, their language unknown but their intent unmistakable.
They had not fallen into paradise. They had fallen into a world of blood.