Ember's Edge
by Daniel Pickett
Firefighter Jake Mercer knows how fire behaves.
It spreads. It consumes. It follows rules.
Until the day it doesn't.
When a routine house fire begins to move in ways that defy everything he's been trained to understand, Jake is pulled into a growing pattern of impossible incidents-fires that don't burn normally, don't spread naturally, and seem to react to his presence.
At first, they're dismissed as anomalies.
Then they start connecting.
Recruited by a covert team tracking the phenomenon, Jake uncovers a disturbing truth: these aren't isolated events. They're fragments of something much larger-a hidden system quietly building beneath reality itself. Each "Ember" is a point of contact, a piece of a network trying to form a bridge between worlds.
And somehow, Jake is the key.
As the pattern accelerates and the boundary between dimensions begins to weaken, Jake is forced into a role no one can fully explain-standing at the center of something that is learning, adapting, and getting closer to breaking through.
To stop it, he'll have to confront the intelligence behind the system... on its side.
But once you cross that line-
There's no guarantee you come back.
It's not spreading. It's connecting.