Lucian did not take the long road.
He took one step off the edge of the younger void, and forced distance to be meaningless. Infinity handled the rest. Routes, gates, layered prohibitions, and all the careful architecture designed to keep lesser things out of older ground folded away from him like they had been built to meaning.
When his foot landed again, the world had been reshuffled in rank.
The Primordial Expanse did not greeter itself with skies and soils, in any honest sense. It was a region of first principles, laid bare. Vast shelves of living law, and drifting continents of compressed origin-fire. Black rivers that ran without water and remembered every name ever spoken over them. In the far distance, structures rose like thoughts too large to be held by bodies: thrones without seats, towers without doors, plains where cause and command still walked openly. All of it felt older than conflict and still engineered for it.
Lucian exhaled once, and steadied.
