The white flash vanished as fast as it came.
Dren hit ground hard enough to make rock jump. Shock tore through him. Every nerve fired, lightning bursting from his skin in short, violent snaps. He rolled, slammed a shoulder, skidded on his back, and stopped staring up at a sky that wasn't his.
Gray dust drifted down in slow streamers. No wind. No sound. Thin air that barely counted as air at all.
He pushed up to a knee. Pain bled across his ribs and collarbone; his hands shook. He spat grit and looked around.
He wasn't in the canyon.
A dead plain stretched in every direction—powder-fine dust, fractured stone, shallow craters like old wounds. The horizon curved gently, wrong in a way he felt before he understood. The light was a washed-out silver, the sky too flat to be sky.
And above the horizon, taking half the heavens, hung a planet.
Green and brilliant. Bands of cloud wrapped it like armor. Storms glowed inside those bands—slow, living spirals flickering with blue-white. He didn't breathe for a full second. The scale hit him in the gut.
Not ground. Not a plateau.
A moon.
He stood slowly. The dust around his boots puffed and fell like it changed its mind midair. Gravity felt soft, just enough to keep him anchored and no more.
He turned a full circle. No Tear behind him. No canyon. No voices. Just an empty horizon and that world filling the sky.
"Perfect," he muttered. "Just perfect."
Lightning crawled under his skin like a pacing animal. The hum in his bones hadn't faded; it had chosen a direction. Down. Toward the planet. It was the same kind of pull the Sable Vow's core had used when it decided he belonged to it.
"Fine," he said. "Let's see where you want me."
He crouched and set both palms to the dust. Power surged up his arms, across his shoulders, down his legs. Cracks spidered out from his hands. His boots vibrated with the charge.
He launched.
The ground detonated under him. He shot upward in a gold flare, a comet trail tearing across the gray. The moon fell away fast. The soft gravity let go like it never meant it.
Space wasn't empty. He felt it the second he left the dust and rock behind—thin lines he couldn't see but his lightning could. Currents stretched between moon and planet, quiet rails of force. His power locked to them like a hook on a cable and pulled him clean.
No air pressed on him. No drag. Just speed. He kept his arms tucked in and used short pulses along his sides to correct pitch and yaw. Each burst nudged him inches. Each nudge held. He tested a roll—half right, half left—then straightened. Good. He could steer.
The planet swelled. Forest-green continents came into focus. Rivers cut bright seams across them. Cloud bands resolved into square-edged blocks stacked and drifting in formation. Lightning moved through those blocks in clean, regular flickers, like veins lit from within.
"You've got storms," he said. "So you've got rules."
He angled wrists and ankles a hair to line up with a thick current that felt stable and true. The hum in his bones matched it. The pull climbed. He let it.
Atmosphere hit like a hammer.
Heat erupted around him, a skin of orange-white fire. Air screamed. His lightning punched back, splitting the fire into sparks, holding his shape inside the shock cone. Sonic booms stacked on top of each other as he drove through the upper layers. He held tight form and bled off speed in controlled bursts, quick and even, never more than he needed.
Clouds slammed into him and shredded. Blue lightning jumped out of them to meet him. His power answered—yellow wrapping blue for a heartbeat, then peeling away as he dropped through.
He broke into open sky.
The world below was a bowl of green and light. A valley spread for miles—dense forest with a faint inner glow, silver rivers braiding through it, pale meadows like islands. Static hung in the air. He felt it on his tongue before he smelled the damp.
He flared both palms. A controlled blast hammered downward, bleeding speed.
He still hit like a meteor.
The impact drove a perfect ring outward. Dirt lifted, trees bent, stones tumbled. He sank knee-deep into torn earth and stopped there, chest heaving, steam rolling off his armor.
Silence came back in pieces—first the hiss of settling grit, then distant crackles where branches met and traded charge. The crater edge glowed faint yellow where heat had glazed the soil to glass.
Dren straightened. His shoulders burned. A bruise formed under his right ribs, sharp when he breathed deep. He ran a quick check—shoulder socket solid, wrists good, neck fine. Cuts on his knuckles scabbed as his lightning stitched skin from the inside.
He took a breath.
Heavy air. Wet. Metallic. It buzzed faintly in his mouth. The planet held a baseline charge. Nothing on Khar-Tor had ever tasted like this.
He looked up. The cloud blocks above slid past one another on clean tracks, edges sharp, blue light pulsing inside them in a pattern he couldn't read yet. Everything here obeyed lines he didn't know.
"This isn't home," he said. "Not even close."
He pivoted slowly, scanning the treeline. Leaves flashed silver sparks where they touched. Thin arcs popped between wet stones and roots. The place was alive with current.
He started toward the lip of the crater, testing his weight. His right leg complained but held. He made it three steps before the air changed.
A hum rolled through the valley—low at first, then rising. Not thunder. Not machine. Closer to a voice without words. It came from above and closed distance at speed.
He turned.
Across the sky, a bright blue streak cut a line and curved toward him. It moved too clean for chance. It wasn't a bolt. It was a person flying inside a bolt.
Dren planted his feet at the center of the crater. Power gathered in his hands. The ground under him cracked again; thin gold lines ran outward like sketch marks.
"Come on," he said.
The blue streak grew from a line to a figure.
A woman. Long hair pulled back by the wind of her speed. Armor shaped to movement, lit from the seams. Blue lightning wrapped her arms and shoulders and bled away behind her in a tail. She didn't wobble or lose altitude. She came in on a perfect vector.
He timed his breath. One heartbeat. Two. Three—
They hit.
Impact detonated a shell of force. The shockwave flattened the nearest trees and sent a wall of air rolling into the forest. Gold and blue exploded together, then separated in a rain of sparks. Dirt turned to fog for a heartbeat and fell as hot dust.
Dren flew backward, bounced off a slab, and rolled onto his side. The world rang. He blinked hard and pushed to an elbow. His arms trembled from the overload. He forced a slow inhale and got half of one.
Shapes returned through the smoke.
She walked out of it with her lightning still live around her. Blue arcs climbed her forearms and jumped to her collar, then settled. Her armor had hairline cracks where force had tried to find a way in and failed. Her eyes glowed faintly with the same color as the sky's bolts.
She stopped ten feet away.
Dren braced a palm and sat up an inch more. The crater field tilted, then steadied. He hated the shake in his hands and ignored it.
"You're not from my world," he said.
She studied him like a mechanic looking at a machine that shouldn't run but was running anyway. No fear. Caution. Interest. A lot of restraint.
The static between them thickened. It wasn't just charge; it was recognition—systems brushing together and deciding how much to share.
Her lightning brightened. "You shouldn't be here," she said. Her voice carried clean over the settling dust. Calm. Certain.
He let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "Story of my life."
He tried to stand. The move sent a spike up his spine and blew the rest of the charge out of his muscles. Control slipped. Light flickered across his chest, then died back to a glow.
His arms gave. He went flat on his back, vision tunneling for a second before it widened again.
She didn't advance right away. She glanced at the sky, then back at him, calculating. The blue around her hands intensified—not attack-bright, but ready. She stepped in to the edge of his reach and crouched, balanced on the balls of her feet, one hand braced on the ground, the other still wreathed in current.
Up close, the details edged into focus: fine mesh under her plates, tiny capacitors at her wrist bones that drank and returned charge, a line of pale scars along the jaw that said training, not panic. The air around her skin hummed at a slightly higher pitch than the valley, as if the world tuned itself when she moved.
She scanned the crater, then him. "You hit from orbit," she said, more to herself than to him. "And you're still breathing."
"Bad habit," he said.
Her mouth almost shifted at that, then didn't. She extended two fingers and hovered them an inch above the scorched plate over his ribs. The blue around her hand expanded in a soft shell. His lightning answered on instinct—yellow rising to meet it before he forced it flat again.
The shell touched his armor and did nothing worse than make heat lines crawl. She watched the reaction like it mattered. It did.
"Not the same," she said softly, eyes narrowing. "Not natural."
He blinked grit away. "Forged," he said. "Long story."
Something flickered in her eyes—recognition or a passing thought she didn't voice. She turned her head slightly, listening to a sound he couldn't hear. Her glow dimmed a fraction.
"Easy," he said, because the old reflex to de-escalate around people who could level a room was hard to kill. "I'm not here to burn your world."
"Good," she said. "That's my job."
He wasn't sure if that was a joke until the corner of her mouth moved half a millimeter. Then it was gone.
The strength ran out of his arms for real. He didn't fight it this time. He set the back of his head to the warm stone and let his breathing even out. The world tilted once and settled.
She watched him until the flicker under his skin steadied. Then she looked past the crater, toward the valley's far edge. Voices—faint, organized—carried across the trees. He caught the tone more than the words: disciplined, trained, moving fast.
She stood and raised one hand. The blue around her fingers pulsed twice—signal, not threat.
Dren drew one last breath and tried to hold on to consciousness out of spite. It didn't stick. His eyes slid shut.
The last thing he saw was her dropping to one knee again, palm hovering over his chest, the glow around her hand strengthening as if she meant to keep him alive long enough to decide what he was.
Everything went still.