Waffle's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Waffle slips through the flea market portal with her catalog half-finished and her patience already thin. The portals are broken, the worlds she needs to document are cutting themselves off one by one, and she's running out of time to map what's left. She moves between stalls on all fours, orange and black fur catching the light from a dozen mismatched realities. The wooden stall appears three rows in, tucked between a vendor selling frozen time and another hawking probability dice. Shelves of bottles glow with liquids that shouldn't be liquid. But one shelf holds glass vials filled with blue-violet strands that twist and loop against the glass. Waffle stops. Her black ear flicks forward. Those aren't liquids at all. She knows the exact weight of portal thread between her paw pads. She knows the way it resists when pulled, the static charge it leaves behind. The bottles on that middle shelf hold the same material she wove into her door. The same thread she used to claw her way out of the gap. Someone harvested it, stabilized it, and brought it here in a weathered supply wagon that still sits behind the stall. Waffle's claws extend slightly into the packed dirt. If portal thread can be bottled and sold, then someone else knows the portals are failing. Someone else has been inside the spaces between worlds. Her catalog suddenly feels incomplete in a way that has nothing to do with missing entries.