The launch vehicle shudders as the engines climb from a growl to a living thunder. He presses back into the seat, every nerve lit by vibration, while the city falls away beneath him in a blur of steel, cloud, and morning glare. For a brief, absurd moment, he expects a dragon to appear in the exhaust plume or a gate of stars to open ahead. Instead, the sky offers only pressure, fire, and the exacting mercy of physics, and he welcomes it like a hard-won spell.

As orbit takes him, the fantasy world that once cloaked everything begins to thin to a transparent sheen. The moon no longer seems enchanted; it is a cratered stone hanging in black emptiness, cold and magnificent in its indifference. He feels grief for the hero he thought he was, and then something larger than grief: relief, because reality has not rejected him after all. It has simply been waiting for him to stop mistaking it for a prison.