Zara awoke with the taste of moss and iron on her tongue and the inescapable certainty that she’d landed in a reality where neither belonged. Around her, the world thrummed—not with silence, but with the soft pulse of life too vast and ancient to be contained by human memory. The air was thick, saturated with scents she struggled to untangle: sweet rot, fungal musk, a bitter metallic tang that reminded her of the bleeding seams between timelines.
