The Unraveling Balance

The first crack appeared in Void Gate Seven at precisely 14:27 Galactic Standard Time.

Not the ordinary stress fracture that occasionally appeared in dimensional barriers under extreme load, but a jagged fissure that seemed to slice through reality itself, exposing the nothingness beyond in ways that made the monitoring equipment scream with alarm codes that had no proper classification.

Senior Technician Kora Valdris had been performing routine maintenance on the gate's stabilization matrix when the dimensional barrier simply... forgot how to maintain its structural integrity. The emerald networks that channeled consciousness through the gate flickered like dying stars, and the void-scanning arrays began registering readings that suggested the fundamental forces that separated existence from nothingness were experiencing systematic failure.