The transition through the Golden Gate was not the instantaneous leap between
dimensions I had expected. It was a slow, agonizing stretching of reality. For a
heartbeat that felt like an eon, the Pearl-Sovereign was caught in the "Thick of
the Threshold," a place where the sun was a solid pillar of amber and the water
was a liquid diamond that refused to yield to the ship's keel. Then, with a
sound like a single, massive violin string snapping across the curvature of the
earth, the light shattered.
We emerged not into a new world, but into the Sargasso of Regrets.
The sky was no longer the vibrant, unblinking citrine of the Sea of the Horizon.
It had settled into a heavy, suffocating shade of bruised violet—the color of a
fading bruise. The sun was a pale, heatless orb that seemed to hang perpetually
at the cusp of drowning in the horizon. But it was the water that silenced the
crew.
The ocean had stopped moving. There were no waves, no ripples, not even the
