Echo

One

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It was not a powerful world. Not filled with magic or great cities. It was a backwater plane that would— in the future— be known as Earth. For now, it was still 12th century AD. No one there knew of rifts or empires in space. The people still feared thunder and worshipped stars from afar.

They fell like dying stars.

The portal ripped through the sky above a dense, old forest in a world that smelled of damp soil, smoke, and wildflowers.

Ilserai and Sol crashed into the earth, surrounded by trees taller than any tower in Velratha. Sound echoed wrong.

The Rift sealed behind them.

Ilserai staggered to her feet, clutching her stomach. Her child had not yet come, but she could feel him shifting inside her—restless, alive, and… different.

Sol landed harder.

He coughed blood into his palm, blinking up at the strange blue sky. “We’re out,” he whispered. “We’re safe.”

They weren’t.

Earth was still primitive.

To Ilserai, it was a world of rawness. She could feel the lack of engineered gravity, the uneven pull of a true planet. The nights were too quiet without the hum of shielded cities.

She hid her silver hair beneath dyed cloth. Wore homespun wool dresses. Kept her voice quiet, her back straight, and her tears hidden.

Sol, weakened by the rift, struggled to adapt. His body had been altered by exposure to so many worlds. Earth’s magicless air was hostile to his cells. He spent long nights fevered, shaking, hallucinating.

They found shelter in an abandoned hunter’s cabin, deep in the woods outside a village called Calven’s Brook.

Ilserai rebuilt it with trembling hands, scavenged herbs she barely recognized, and learned to cook over fire.

She missed the stars. The real stars. Not these distant, flickering motes.

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She discovered, slowly, that the child (still unborn) wasn’t just developing inside her—it was changing her.

At night, her skin would hum faintly with heat, and the air would ripple around her belly. Animals came near her in silence—rabbits, deer, even a wolf once, all drawn to something ancient and wrong. Not dangerous. But unnatural.

She felt her unborn child dreaming.

Dreams not of Earth, but of places she’d never seen—worlds with floating oceans, cities built into clouds, deserts that whispered names.

Sol began writing again.

Not journals.

Maps. Not of space. But of possibility.

He knew he was dying, and Ilserai begged him to let her open the rift again, to find a world with medicine or magic or advanced healing chambers.

But he refused. “If we keep running… we may be found.”

So he stayed, and each day, he faded a little more.

That evening, under a sky littered with fireflies, he gave her a necklace—an old shard of tech engraved with forgotten runes.

“If he ever gets lost… this will call him home.”

He died two nights later, sitting beneath the old oak behind the cabin, with a book of blank pages in his lap and her name written 776 times on the first.

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