Prologue

  Since the first spark of consciousness flared in the hollow skull of early man, humanity has lifted its gaze to the stars, seeking meaning in the night’s endless sprawl. We built stories from constellations, turned gods into planets, read our futures in the slow dance of celestial fire. And yet, in all our searching, we have looked in the wrong direction.

  The truth does not lie above.

  It lies beneath.

  The universe as we know it—the immeasurable cascade of galaxies, the symphony of gravity and entropy—is but a filament. A single thread spun through a loom far older, far stranger, than any mind could fathom. Beyond it stretches an endless tapestry: layered realms, mirrored dimensions, forgotten timelines. A million worlds, perhaps more, stacked like the pages of a book whose cover has long since been lost.

  And between those pages? A veil.

  A membrane of dreamstuff and silence, gossamer-thin yet unfathomably vast. It hums with memory, woven from laws older than physics, stitched by hands that may never have existed. For eons, it has kept the worlds apart—bending, shifting, adapting—but never breaking.

  Until now.

  Some have glimpsed the fractures. Most dismiss them: a shadow flitting across the corner of the eye, a whisper that doesn’t match the voice in the room, the lingering scent of something that should not be. They rationalize. Deny. Forget.

  But these anomalies are not tricks of the mind.

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  They are symptoms of a deeper illness.

  A convergence approaches. Slowly. Inevitably. It presses against the edges of our reality like a breath fogging cold glass, and the veil—our last defense—begins to fray.

  Molten veins of silver shimmer through the fabric of existence, curling through matter and memory alike. Time buckles. Space distorts. Realms bleed. And from the cracks, the first echoes of the forgotten begin to stir.

  They are not spirits. Not precisely.

  They are echoes from elsewhere—beings not of death, but of difference. Some come as angels, cloaked in radiant symmetry. Others arrive as nightmares given form. All of them impossible. All of them real.

  And with them comes chaos.

  But chaos is not always a destroyer. It is also a crucible. A forge in which the old is broken to make way for the new. In the fires of convergence, destinies are reshaped, fates rewritten. The guilty may yet find redemption. The cursed may discover purpose. The lost may be found.

  Yet every act of creation demands a sacrifice.

  This is the story of that sacrifice.

  Of a widower, James Caldwell, haunted not just by grief but by echoes of another life. Of a detective, Victor Harrow, who seeks salvation at the edge of a blade he forged himself. Of a warrior, Tyvor, born Thomas, who traded innocence for power and now walks the threshold between. Of a child, Anna, whose eyes see too much, and whose dreams carry the weight of worlds. Of a rogue, Oscar, golden and wild, shaping realities without knowing what he awakens.

  Each of them bound by threads they cannot see, drawn toward a singular moment when the veil will fall.

  They believe the unknown is distant. They are wrong.

  The Conjunction is not coming.

  It is already here.

  And so I ask you, reader, dreamer, wanderer—when the unraveling begins, when the world you know peels away like dead bark revealing the terrible beauty underneath...

  Will you cling to what was?

  Or will you step forward, into what must be?