The dream came that night.
Isabella had been asleep for perhaps two hours when the world shifted and she was standing on ground that felt wrong under her feet—too light, like the gravity had been turned down but not off. The air tasted strange. Thin. Cold.
She looked up.
The sky was the wrong color.
Not the black of space or the blue of Earth, but a deep bruised violet that seemed to pulse with its own internal light. Two bands of luminescence stretched across the horizon—not a sun, not stars, but something else entirely. They moved slowly, like rivers of light flowing through the upper atmosphere.
Isabella's heart hammered. This wasn't Earth. This wasn't anywhere she'd ever been.
The landscape around her was barren—rocky outcroppings and dust, no vegetation, no water. In the distanc
