The briefing chamber hovered five hundred meters above the central axis of Calvessan's Interdimensional Harmonics Institute.
It was a cylindrical vault suspended in place by a scaffold of solidified pressure-stilled light—no doubt the great work of some institutional Innovator out there. From the outside, the chamber resembled a shard of glass caught mid-spin. From within, it felt like being inside a tone.
This was the Glass Shore—the heart of Calvessan's upper district, and the closest thing the Prime World had to a center of reality…and commerce.
The Interdimensional Harmonics Institute, or IHI, wasn't just a research body. It was the engine that powered the Lattice, controlling the science behind how the planes stayed connected.
If a portal opened, if a pathway shifted, if a Signature flared too hot—someone at IHI catalogued, monitored, and signed off.
Every major interdimensional corridor passed through its jurisdiction. Every signature of note was logged in its archives.
And Calvessan? Calvessan was the city that shouldn't exist. Too many layers, too many fractures, too much pressure between what it was and what it tried to be. But the Field had been bent to hold it together and the Lattice kept it stable.
The other dimensions let Calvessan stand—not because it was safe, but because nobody wanted to know what might happen if it fell.
Tyrian had grown up with the view: spirals of glass towers, stacked districts and zones layered like sediment, each with its own laws of reality rewritten to suit the tastes of Noble families. Tyrian often got lost examining its layers from on high.
Below, the city unraveled outward in rings, neon scars glowing across its night-bent surface. And higher still, the sky: striated, reactive, alive with layered light. There were no stars. Just glowing trails of Field energy and broken moons—one sharp, one cracked, one that came and went, shifting constantly, like a broadcast always being rewritten.
Calvessan—and this tower in particular—was where the Lattice pulsed loudest. Where decisions echoed across planes.
And today, they'd put his name on the manifest.
Tyrian Vyr sat in the back row, spine straight, hands folded. He had been waiting for this moment.
The chairs were arranged in a downward spiral—classic Field Harmonics design. His face was still—not unreadable, just quietly focused, as if he were intently listening for something.
He wasn't.
He was tracing the flaws in the room's acoustic symmetry. The way the speaker's voice bounced wrong off the inner ring. One of the support beams—supposed to be pressure-stilled—was pulsing just a half-beat off. Barely noticeable. But enough to throw the whole pattern out of sync.
_'Classic IHI—symmetry-obsessed, and still one degree off.'_
He didn't say anything. He rarely did.
The briefing had started.
[UNIT ACCESS: OBSERVATION LOG – ACCESS: VYR-T. BASE CLEARANCE]
[EVENT TAG: FOLDPOINT 9 – CALIBRATION MISSION, VASKERA CORRIDOR EXTENSION]
Tyrian's Lattice overlay confirmed the assignment parameters. The principal researcher spoke from the center platform. Institutional white robes. Black gloves. A fine network of crystalline lines threaded beneath her skin, flickering in and out of view like a half-remembered diagram.
"Foldpoint Nine has stabilized enough to allow the third-stage corridor extension. Today's calibration is a pressure-sync event. We're not expecting resistance. "
That meant they were trying to stretch a bridge between worlds—just a little wider. The Vaskera corridor was expanding again. They wanted to increase cargo throughput, and they needed a wider more stable bridge to do so.
But the space around it was still soft. Still strange. Creating channels between dimensions was like trying to build a bridge across moving water. A pressure-sync was their way of smoothing the waves—aligning forces so the connection would hold.
This was the reality of the modern planes: A constellation of interconnected dimensions. Some were found. Others, created. All held together by trade, calibration, and necessity.
"This extension represents not just technical achievement, but a gesture of renewed partnership with the Vaskeran Dimension," the speaker continued, "Calvessan's corridor stability remains the gold standard for interdimensional trade. This calibration will reinforce that perception."
The speaker's phrasing was standard, maybe even rehearsed—but everything about the her tone implied this wasn't just about stability.
This was optics.
What she really meant was: Don't let this mission fail.
A delegation of Vaskeran elites would be present. So would the press—broadcasting clips of the operation across public Lattice streams. The mission was designed to demonstrate control, restore economic confidence, and reassert Calvessan's place as the spine of the Constellation.
What she conveniently left out was: The last corridor that flickered like this collapsed two years ago, and the Lattice still won't confirm what caused it.
"Lead assignment: Vera Caldrix, Sublime-Rank."
That part made sense.
Sublime-Rank Innovators weren't just powerful—they were iconic, world-bending forces of nature. Rare, curated, and often spoken of more like artifacts than people. Some could open rifts across dimensional barriers. Others could fold space around themselves like clothing. The most dangerous among them could design pocket realities—small, persistent dimensions that obeyed their own internal logic.
So for a mission like this, when reality tried to bend itself around two anchors, you needed someone who could reweave the difference. That's what the Sublime did.
The ranks were meant to measure one thing: how deeply your soul could shape the Field.
Latent rank was only potential, a potential every human across the planes was born with.
Base was the first threshold, where you first developed a Signature you could control.
Reactive meant your Signature could begin operating on its own, based on set principles, without your conscious control.
Catalytic was the beginning of true environmental influence and control.
Noble meant you didn't just change the Field. You could give it a fixed structure.
Sublimes were like walking stars, powerful enough to begin generating their own realities.
And Aether? That wasn't a rank. That was a state. The very soul becomes a dimension. The Field doesn't just listen. It _lives_ inside you. In fact, Aetheric innovators had created—and were now sustaining—many of the dimensions that now served as points in the constellation.
The speaker droned on, "Assistants: Catalytics Three and Seven. Float Anchor: Vyr."
Despite their power, Catalytics were considered mid-tier Innovators. Tyrian was Base-Rank. Technically stable, technically combat-certified, technically useful.
And still—he was being deployed to the same mission. Not to lead or support. Just to float. In fact, that was his exact role: float anchor. He was serving as a human tuning fork—placed on-site to observe, to attune to the Field, and sometimes to record or stabilize local conditions _just enough_ to help the system sync properly—but he was not supposed to act.
No one looked at him. That was part of it.
His name on the roster was more politics than logistics. Some analyst, or someone higher, had decided it would look good to have a Vyr on the manifest. His presence—no, his name signified order.
He didn't mind.
Mostly.
But if he were a little less composed, he might've rolled his eyes when they called him _"Float Anchor"_ like it was a real role instead of a placeholder.
---
Tyrian exited the chamber through a private egress—one of the upper concourse lines reserved for upper-tier personnel, dignitaries, and high-clearance observers.
He didn't ask for it. But someone had ensured he had it anyway.
The lift was seamless: light-pressure platform, zero sound, touchless operation. The kind of thing people wrote poems about in Foundation-era aesthetics journals.
He stepped into the corridor beyond—clean, echoless, trimmed in glass that adjusted its opacity to match the mood of the user.
Tyrian set it to neutral.
No mood today.
His satellites floated around him, silent as ever. There were three now, in formation: Luth, Cato, and Eurydice. They weren't machines, nor were they alive. But they moved with a subtle rhythm.
Cato drifted just a little wide on its second curve, its rotation lagging by 0.02 degrees.
Not enough to matter, but enough to notice.
Tyrian raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
No response, of course. They didn't respond, at least not to words. But still.
"We haven't even started the mission," he murmured, tapping a glyph at his wrist. The disc corrected its arc.
"Pull that during the calibration and I'm renaming you."
A pause.
"To something embarrassing."
He kept walking.
The corridor curved upward, offering a glimpse of the upper district's skyline—Calvessan's wealth on full display: spires threaded with resonance, vaults suspended in phaseglass, courier glyphs floating like divine insects. The sky rippled in shifting bands of color—blue-violet, copper-gold, and pale white—woven in slow-moving arcs like light stretched through glass.
Down below, whole city layers flickered with corrosion and noise.
Up here, it was all clean edges and expensive silence.
He hated how easy it was to disappear in it.