Sixteen years had passed since I was sent to the Prison World.
According to the calendar tied to that dimension, it was still May 10, 1994. To me, however, that date no longer meant anything.
At first, I could only reproduce small spaces.
My first success created a room. Not a perfect copy, of course. The walls were there, the floor was there, and there was a functional door. But the space wasn't stable enough to hold complex objects. Anything placed inside would disappear after a few minutes.
The air didn't circulate properly either; the temperature rose and fell erratically, and the ceiling repeated itself every four seconds.
Still, it was a dimension. Small, unstable, and useless, but a dimension. I had proven it was possible.
The second model managed to maintain the space for nearly an hour. The third lasted three full cycles before collapsing.
After countless attempts, I managed to preserve an entire room.
The walls didn't crumble. The floor didn't vanish. The objects remained in place. Time passed at a steady pace.
It was the first time I'd stepped into a dimension I'd created myself. It didn't seem impressive.
It was just an empty room, with metal walls and a single light bulb. But I had built it.
Not the coven. Me.
The next step was to create three connected rooms.
This required more than simply increasing the size of the matrix. The Ascendant needed to understand that the spaces were different but belonged to the same structure.
The first prototype created three overlapping rooms. If I stood in the center of one, I could see parts of the others through the walls. A door led to the same space regardless of which direction it was opened.
Another prototype created three separate rooms, but with no connection between them. I could enter one, but I couldn't reach the others.
The third created a functional sequence.
Room. Hallway. Room. Hallway. Room.
The structure was simple but stable. The space didn't fall apart, and time flowed normally. From that point on, I understood that creating a dimension wasn't just about copying matter.
It was about creating relationships. Distance. Direction. Continuity. Cause and effect.
The original Ascendant didn't just copy objects. It copied the way each thing related to the others.
That's when I realized that my first models were trying to reproduce the world like a photograph.
I needed to reproduce it as a system.
The first house took almost two years to function properly. I tried starting with a copy of Parker House itself, but the result was a disaster. The amount of magical information present on the property interfered with the matrix.
The house I created had doors that led to different rooms every time they were opened. The windows showed landscapes that didn't belong to the same place. The basement was larger on the inside than it should have been, and on some occasions, it didn't exist at all.
So I simplified the design. I started with a small structure.
Four walls, a second story, a basement, basic rooms—no original magic, no enchanted objects, no illusions.
The first model lasted only twenty minutes. The second retained the structure but didn't reproduce gravity correctly. Objects fell in different directions depending on the room.
The third one worked for six hours. The fourth survived an entire cycle. The fifth survived three. Then I managed to create a stable house.
The dimension contained a complete residence, basic furniture, lighting, water, and temperature control. Nothing was alive. There were no animals, people, or any form of life other than the decorative plants I had placed as inert elements of the copy.
Even so, the house worked. I could enter it, leave it, store objects, and alter its structure without affecting the main Prison World.
That's when I started thinking about creating private spaces.
Dimensional vaults, hidden laboratories, containment rooms, escape points.
~~~~~~-------~~~~~~~~--------~~~~~~~~-------~~~~
A house was one thing; a neighborhood was another. The difference wasn't just in size. It was in complexity.
A neighborhood required streets, water systems, electrical distribution, multiple houses, consistent distances, and a coherent topography.
It also needed a boundary; if the created space had no defined limits, the dimension would begin to expand uncontrollably. My first neighborhood had no streets.
The houses were scattered across a flat, white surface, with no connection to one another. The second had streets, but they all led to the same intersection. The third created a functional network.
I could walk through its streets and return to the starting point without taking the same path twice. It was the first model that truly felt like a place.
I spent months testing its stability—walking for kilometers, measuring distances, altering houses, removing streets, and observing how the matrix corrected the damage. The dimension was able to repair itself.
Not like the Prison World, but to a limited extent. If a street were destroyed, the structure would attempt to restore it using the original matrix. If I removed a house, the space it occupied remained empty.
If I created a new building, it would only continue to exist if it were protected by the Rune of the Interstice. This confirmed something important.
The Ascendant created the dimension; the Rune of the Interstice allowed it to accumulate history. Without the rune, all my worlds would be nothing more than static copies. With it, they could become real places.
In 2010, I managed to create a city. Not a perfect replica of the outside world. It had no oceans, mountains, or population. But it had streets, buildings, neighborhoods, tunnels, transportation systems, and an area large enough that it took me days to explore it all.
The main matrix recorded the space, the secondary matrices organized each district, and the storage cores supplied energy.
The Rune of the Interstice preserved the changes. I had managed to progress from one room to three rooms.
From three rooms to a house, from a house to a neighborhood, from a neighborhood to a city. The next stage would be a world.
I still didn't know how long it would take or if I could do it on my own, but now I had a method.
~~~~~~------~~~~~~~~-------~~~~~~~------~~~~~~~~
My Ascendant wasn't a perfect copy of the original. It was better in some ways and inferior in others.
I had replaced fragile components with more durable alloys. I reorganized the runic channels. I created safety valves and emergency matrices.
I also managed to reduce the amount of energy wasted during the opening of the portal. The original required a celestial event to operate at full capacity.
My version still needed a powerful energy source, but it could use Qetsiyah's blood as an amplifier more efficiently. That didn't mean I could create an entire world without help.
Not yet. Creating a city consumed almost all the energy from my largest cores; creating a planet would be impossible. Creating a copy of the entire world remained beyond my reach.
But the Ascendant could already do something I needed: open a door.
[...]
The Ascendant lay on the table. Qetsiyah's calcified blood remained in a small glass container, preserved by magic. Although it did not come from a modern Bennett, her lineage and magical signature were compatible with the mechanism. It was the blood of an ancestor directly linked to the origin of the knowledge used by the Bennetts and the Prison Worlds.
It's morning; the celestial event will begin in a few hours.
But I don't need it, because Qetsiyah's blood already holds enough magic to replace tonight's eclipse.
I picked up the Ascendant and walked to the spot where I intended to open the passage. The location held no special significance.
I placed the Ascendant in the palm of my hand and opened the container. A small amount of Qetsiyah's blood was dripped onto the artifact.
The internal gears began to turn; the sound was faint but familiar. The sharp edges on the sides vibrated, absorbing the blood's magical signature.
Energy coursed through the Ascendant. The gears spun faster, meshing with one another.
"Sanguinem filio, sanguinem effurgarex perpetuum. Sanguinem filio, sanguinem effurgarex perpetuum. Phasmatos filio, Phasmatos effurgarex perpetuum!" I recited the incantation as that familiar white light blinded me.
I felt embraced by that light; I felt the warmth course through me, along with the sensation of being moved from one dimension to another. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, I was falling; a blue portal had opened in the air, and I had been thrown out of it.
Fortunately, it wasn't very high. I landed on the damp asphalt of a narrow alley, rolled a few meters, and came to a stop near a metal trash can. Pain shot through my shoulder, but nothing was broken.
I sat there for a few seconds, taking in my surroundings.
The brick walls were covered in graffiti. A single streetlight partially illuminated the alley. The smell of rain, trash, and fuel hung in the air.
Then I heard a car passing on the main street. After that, a door slamming shut.
The blue portal had vanished. I looked at the Ascendant in my hand. The gears had stopped turning. Qetsiyah's blood had been consumed in the process, but the artifact remained intact.
I smiled slightly and stood up from the ground, brushing off my clothes.
"I'm back, bitches."
Portland, Oregon
The sound of laughter in the Parker family's dining room used to be the only time Josette could forget the weight she carried on her shoulders.
She watched her younger siblings, Luke and Liv—now teenagers—playing with their cutlery at the table. Joshua, her father, carved the meat with his usual surgical precision, maintaining the stern demeanor of a leader but casting a rare look of approval toward the younger twins.
Jo smiled slightly, wiping her lips with her cloth napkin. She loved them and would do anything for them. She had spent the last sixteen years ensuring that the coven was a safe place for them both to grow up, even though she knew that, in the future, the inevitable and cruel Fusion would come knocking on one of their doors. It was the price of power. The price of keeping the bloodline alive.
She stretched out her arm to reach for the pitcher of juice in the center of the table.
Click
It wasn't a physical sound. It was a sound that echoed directly inside her skull, like the snapping of a guitar string stretched to its limit.
The crystal pitcher slipped from her fingers, falling heavily onto the table and spilling the red liquid onto the white tablecloth.
"Jo?" Liv asked, cutting off her laughter. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"
Josette didn't answer. Her pupils dilated to their fullest. A sudden, violent migraine struck the base of her skull, blurring her vision for a second. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the mystical sensation that flooded her chest.
For sixteen years, the left side of her magical soul—the mystical channel that every Gemini twin shares with their other half at birth—had been completely dormant. It was an empty echo, a cold scar from when they'd locked the monster away during the 1994 eclipse. She'd thought it was rotting away inside. She was certain he was just a worthless worm, incapable of escaping the Prison World.
But now… the channel was open. And it wasn't just open; it was burning.
A wave of cold, piercing, and absurdly familiar energy whipped down Jo's spine. It was his magical signature. That suffocating presence from when he'd try to get close enough to drain her magic as a child—but now tripled, refined, distilled by years of isolation that clearly hadn't destroyed him.
Jo's chair scraped sharply backward as she stood, gasping for breath. Her hands were visibly shaking.
"Joshua…" Jo's voice came out as a strangled whisper; in her panic, she forgot the formality of addressing him as "Father."
Joshua dropped his cutlery immediately. The coven leader's face paled as he noticed the look of pure terror in his eldest daughter's eyes. As an experienced witch—and knowing what it was like to have a twin brother—he needed no explanation. He knew what that reaction meant.
"It can't be…" Joshua murmured, his eyes fixed on Jo. "It's impossible to escape from there without Bennett blood—how the hell did he…"
"He's here," Jo hissed, baring her teeth, mixing fear with the blind fury she'd always felt toward her brother. The arrogance she'd flaunted for over a decade crumbled in seconds. "He's back, Father. The worm has crawled out of its hole."
Joana slammed her wine glass hard against the wood, her eyes half-closed in sheer denial.
"That's ridiculous, Josette," Joana said dismissively. "It's impossible to escape the prison world, let alone a siphoner without a shred of self-pity who couldn't even break through a simple barrier on his own. He must have starved to death in that cheap knockoff of Portland."
"Shut up, Joana!" Jo snapped, turning her face toward her sister, breathing heavily. "You don't feel what I feel. The connection is alive. He's breathing the same air as us, at this very second."
Across the table, Megan let out a nervous laugh, though the color had drained from her cheeks. She instantly remembered how many times she'd locked Kai in the broom closet when they were kids, laughing as he begged to be let out.
"If that monster really found a crack to crawl back through… we'll just throw him back in there. He's still the same piece of trash who can't cast a spell without begging to touch one of our skins. He's not a real wizard," Megan said, masking her panic with false confidence.
Joshua Parker stood up, silencing his daughters. "Enough. We don't know what happened, but we're not going to underestimate him. Joana, Megan, prepare the tracking spell. If he really did escape, my blood will travel across the map to wherever he is," he said, taking a knife and making a cut in his hand, letting the blood drip into an empty goblet.
He continued as he handed the cup to Joana. "We're going to hunt him down before he leaves Oregon. If he managed to escape from the Prison World, he's a real threat and shouldn't be underestimated," he added.