The colossal ring had torn open the fabric of space itself. The void around it rippled like water after a stone has been dropped into it, and out of that distortion the impossible had emerged — a gate vast enough to swallow worlds, so large that the Tartarusios, proud and mighty as she was, looked no bigger than a drifting feather in front of it. Every soul on the command deck could only stare, breathless and wide-eyed. The fabled Corridor Gate had awakened, and there was no turning back now.
Oscar's hand tightened on the command rail as he glanced toward Zoma, whose silver-lit form stood calm in the middle of the trembling lights and the vibrating hull. "It's time," he said, firm but touched with awe. "We're going in."
Zoma's eyes flickered with ancient light as she studied each of them for a brief, silent moment, and then she offered a slow, graceful bow. "Well then, brave wanderers," she said softly, almost like a farewell. "It is time to take the most important journey of your lives. May you all come out the other side."
The engines roared to life, and the Tartarusios began her slow descent into the gaping abyss. For an instant it seemed as though every atom in existence was screaming. The ship shuddered violently, metal groaned, the lights flickered, and the stars outside were ripped away. Then there was silence.
When their sight returned, the corridors unfolded around them, and they were unlike anything that could exist in the known universe. Reality had lost its shape and become an endless expanse of drifting fog and fractured light, where the stars had been replaced by rolling clouds of pink, blue and gray that swirled together like celestial smoke. Lightning flared through the haze in perfect silence and painted the ship's hull with flashes of ghostly brilliance. The fog moved as if it were breathing, its colors shifting in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Far off in the haze drifted fragments of shattered worlds — the silhouettes of mountains, ruined ships and strange metallic spires that faded in and out of existence. Every flash of lightning revealed a little more of the impossible before the mist swallowed it again. Time itself seemed broken there. Seconds stretched and folded over. Past and future bled into each other, and the fog pulsed in rhythm with the Tartarusios' engines, as though the corridor recognized the ship and was echoing her heartbeat. It was a place both divine and cursed, a dreamscape of creation and ruin where gods might once have walked and died. Through it the Tartarusios drifted like a single fragile spark sailing through the arteries of existence.
Down in the crew quarters, people pressed their faces to the viewports and said nothing at all. Somebody started to pray under their breath and then stopped, embarrassed, and nobody laughed at them. Up on the command deck, Zoma stood at the helm with her holographic hands gliding effortlessly over the controls. She had done this many times before. The rest of them could only watch in disbelief. Finally Bjorn leaned closer, his voice trembling with awe and confusion. "How can you possibly know where we're going without navigation? All our systems are blind. There's nothing out there!"
Zoma turned to him with a faint smile and tapped her temple. "I don't need your ship's navigation to cross the corridors. It's all in here. My system contains the complete map of the corridors. It's impossible to get lost."
Bjorn blinked. "Impossible? Then what's the danger?"
"Eruptions," she said simply.
"Eruptions?"
Zoma turned back toward the view, and her expression darkened. "The corridors exist outside of time. There is no present here, and no future or past. Every passage through a gate happens at once. When you entered, you joined every other ship that has ever entered — and every ship that ever will. The fog divides those layers of time and keeps each moment apart from the others." Her eyes flickered with distant memories. "But sometimes, the division fails. Two layers collide. When that happens, paths cross, and ships can slip into realities they were never meant to enter. That is what we call an eruption."
The room went silent as the weight of what she had said pressed down on all of them. They were traveling through something no mortal mind had been built to understand.
Oscar leaned forward, low and steady. "And how do you know all this, Zoma?"
She smiled faintly — a haunting, almost human expression. "Because my creators lived through it. There were two recorded instances of ships meeting each other in the corridors, each from a different time. The first was a Baraken vessel that entered ten years apart from its counterpart. The older ship was caught in an eruption and collided with its own future self. Both bore the same crest, but one was a far more advanced design, and when they emerged, the newer ship had gone ten years back in time."
Bjorn's eyes widened. "So they used the corridors to travel through time?"
"In a sense. They used that anomaly to accelerate their progress. The ship from the future brought back the design of the next generation, and every loop pushed the empire further forward. That is how the Baraken Empire advanced faster than any civilization before it."
The realization hit the crew like a thunderclap. The secret behind the Baraka's impossible rise had never been technology alone. It had been theft — theft from their own future.
Bjorn's heart was racing. "And the second instance?" he asked, barely above a whisper.
Zoma turned slowly toward him, and her eyes dimmed with something that looked like reverence, or perhaps sorrow. "The second instance," she said, "was the arrival of my creator. The one I was named after. Zoma."
Her words hung in the air like a prophecy, and for the first time, the crew understood that they were no longer simply travelers. They were witnesses to the machinery of gods. Somewhere behind them, the corridor folded shut, and the way home disappeared with it.