the Story
— Page 1 —
A single pulse shook the abandoned moon of Serrath-9, rolling across iron dunes like distant thunder. Frost-coated pylons—remnants of a long-dead observatory—flashed with ghostly ultraviolet runes. Vera Flux, quantum cartographer, knelt beside a circular glyph etched into the sand. She pressed her gauntlet to the sigil, and an emerald shockwave raced outward, peeling open a portal that smelled of petrichor and static.
Beside her, K’to the Seeker—a bio-forged being woven from filamentous fungi and liquid chrome—extended a tendril to steady the tear in space-time. Mycelial threads glistened along his arm, each one humming the same subterranean note: a low G that matched Vera’s own heartbeat.
They had come to find the Pulse-Spire, a living tower rumored to recalibrate reality itself. No vessel could reach it by conventional means; only the Sporewave, an interdimensional tide of sentient spores, could ferry travelers across the void. And it was rising—right on cue—beneath the portal’s rim.
— Page 2 —
The leap felt like sliding through liquid glass. Light fractured, reassembled, and then exploded into a river of bioluminescent particles: the Sporewave. Each spore was a microscopic eye reflecting whole galaxies. Vera and K’to surfed its crest on boards formed from crystallized intent, gravity forgotten.
Currents of color rippled beneath them—violet cyclones, crimson geysers—each one broadcasting whispered memories of extinct civilizations. The wave’s roar twisted into ancient songs, promising revelation or ruin with every bend. Vera leaned forward, hair dissolving into photon mist, steering toward faint flashes ahead: the Spire’s heartbeat, thundering like a subterranean drum.
But the Sporewave was capricious. A maelstrom of prismatic shards spun into view, morphing into a colossal helix. It yanked them sideways, dumping them into a Silence Rift—a pocket where sound, time, and thought collapsed into a single unmoving point. Their momentum vanished; so did color. Only a monochrome horizon remained.
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Within the Rift, Vera saw echoes of herself multiply in infinite grayscale: versions who had turned back, who had died, who had chosen other moons. Each held her gaze in solemn recognition before fading like ash. K’to’s body dimmed to a skeletal lattice of glowing hyphae. For one terrifying moment, his consciousness—normally spread among billions of cells—flickered like a faulty beacon.
Then, from the abyss, a lone spore the size of a planetoid drifted near. Its surface displayed a spiraling sigil identical to the one Vera had activated on Serrath-9. She reached out; the sigil glowed, answering her pulse with a soft, melodic G-minor chord felt rather than heard. The Silence Rift shattered as if glass under strain.
The Sporewave roared back, but now it burned emerald and gold, charging faster than before—an Overdrive surge that demanded absolute surrender. Vera and K’to dove atop the torrent, letting it swallow them whole.
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Speed dissolved shape and distance. They became vectors of intent, streaks of consciousness braided into the wave. Ahead, the Pulse-Spire materialized—a bio-luminescent tower woven from titanic mushroom caps and molten starlight, spiraling into an endless sky. Each pulse from its core radiated crimson concentric circles, retuning the fabric of surrounding nebulae.
But guardians encircled its base: dark silhouettes resembling tidal serpents, scales glimmering with anti-light. The serpents fed on disruption, sensing the tremor of the Sporewave’s Overdrive. K’to flared all his mycelial veins, projecting a lattice of phosphorescent nets. Vera summoned crystalline prisms formed from refracted memories, hurling them like blades.
Light clashed with anti-light; sound warped; the Overdrive shrieked one octave higher. At the crescendo, the wave itself folded into a vertical spear, impaling the serpents in a burst of radiance that tore shadows from their skins. The guardians dissolved into cascades of obsidian dust.
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Silence descended—but this time it was the hush of awe, not entropy. The Pulse-Spire opened like a colossal lotus, revealing a hollow corridor lined with breathing walls of velvet spore musk. Vera stepped forward; her boot met the living floor, and the Spire’s pulse synced perfectly with hers: dum-dum… dum-dum…
K’to followed, threads still glowing from battle. Spores clustered at their feet, arranging themselves into runes that read, “ONLY TWO MAY TUNE THE COSMOS.” Ahead glimmered a throne of translucent mycelium, branching cables stretching into unknown dimensions.
Vera felt the weight of choice: to sit was to rewrite constellations, birth new timelines, erase old ones. K’to rested a hand of woven light on her shoulder. Together they advanced, hearts steady at 125 beats per minute—ready to seize the Spire’s metronome and strike the first chord of a rewritten universe.
And somewhere, far across the Sporewave’s infinite depths, galaxies held their breath—awaiting the downbeat of whatever reality would pulse next.
the Gallery
