After two days of nonstop teleporting from world to world—space folding around him in rose-pink ripples, galaxies blurring into streaks of light—Ash finally arrived at the dead world, Blek.
It floated in the quiet emptiness like a lost marble—huge but completely lifeless, a dull gray ball of fractured stone and dust beneath a pitch-black sky.
No seas rippled across its surface; no breezes drifted over its vast stretches of dry rock. Craters scarred the land like old injuries, their depths swallowing what little light dared to touch them.
The air was thin and stale, laced with the faint metallic taste of cosmic dust and decay.
No life stirred here—no plants fighting to survive, no animals roaming, not even the faintest trace of microbes in the soil. It was a blank canvas, humming softly with potential beneath the heavy silence, waiting for someone to shape it anew.
