||The Awakening Fire||
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The ship was old. Too old for its class. A relic from a forgotten war, drifting in the deep shadow of a dead star with its systems masked by nullspace veils and quantum mirrors. Even the Amalthean Empire had long struck it from the records.
But within that hollowed shell of iron and secrets, something moved.
Hunched over an altar made not of faith, but of circuitry and bones, a figure stirred.
Her name was Ezreth, though the world had long ceased calling her anything at all. Those who remembered whispered only of the Pale Oracle, a being exiled from the Temporal Accord for crimes she had never committed—or at least, not in ways her enemies could prove.
She lit the black flame of seeing with a thought. It flickered into being in the shape of a lotus, its petals unfolding in reverse.
Threads of light emerged, each one linked to a soul across the Real Continuum. A thousand flickered, a hundred burned. But one—just one—had begun to pulse.
She focused.
There it was.
A spark. Not from the lower realms, not one of the Seekers already touched by the Infinite—but something else.
A soul that had cracked the boundary without guidance. No pact. No invocation. No summoning.
Just raw existence breaching the veil.
Ezreth's mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile.
"He's awake," she murmured, fingers brushing a string of teeth that hung around her neck, each tooth belonging to a different race long gone.
A whimper echoed behind her. From the shadows, a chained servant—a creature with four arms and the face of a broken mirror—cowered beneath her gaze.
"Fetch me the Orb," she said calmly. "The Divergence has begun."
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Back in the Core Systems—Imperial Space
Code Seven moved across the wastes with measured grace.
The facility was buried beneath kilometers of red rock and ice, a desert carved by solar winds and centuries of war. The Empire had hidden it well—too well. The very emptiness around it had become a natural defense.
But Seven knew where the edges of confinement ended. The illusion of walls, rules, direction—those meant nothing now.
His soul burned. Not in pain—but in friction. As if he were dragging something vast and invisible behind him. Every step felt like a ripple across multiple layers of space.
He did not know the words for what had changed in him.
He only knew he was no longer bound.
He paused on a high ridge of jagged obsidian, overlooking the broken sky. Three suns—distant and pale—hung low in the atmosphere. The planet was dying. Like so many others.
But Seven was not looking at the stars.
He was listening.
And it came.
[Observation Level Elevated: Tier One.]
A vibration—not in the air, but in the silence between seconds.
[External Awareness Detected.]
He stiffened. For the first time since awakening, something looked back.
[You are being watched.]
The words burned across the edge of reality. Seven saw no figure, no form. But he felt it.
Elsewhere, some ancient being shifted in its throne of thought. Something old, and quiet, and patient. A seer? A devourer? Perhaps both.
[The Infinite Planes observe the divergence.]
Then, just as suddenly, the presence withdrew.
Seven exhaled.
A whisper followed.
"Marked one…"
He turned.
Behind him stood a figure cloaked in rotting velvet, its hands composed entirely of rusted chains. No face beneath the cowl—just depth, infinite and crawling.
"You have breached what should not be breached," the creature hissed.
Seven stepped back.
"I don't know you."
"You will. You all do." It tilted its unseen head. "You belong to us now, Marked One. The moment you stepped across that threshold, you became noticeable."
Seven's body moved before he thought. His hand darted toward the creature's neck—but it was already gone, vanished like smoke in light.
Only the chains remained—clinking as they fell to the ground.
And with them, a message.
Not words. Not commands. A feeling.
Run.
-------
Elsewhere: In a Kingdom of Masks
The Dominion of Vharaxus had not sent an envoy in six hundred years.
It was not known for curiosity, only silence and vengeance.
But when the first divergence rippled through the Infinite Planes, its attention snapped awake like a bear from hibernation.
Atop a throne of skin and shadow, a dozen faceless priests intoned without tongues, drawing sigils of notice and suspicion.
They saw a soul with no records. A light that had never been lit—and yet now blazed with the intensity of an old god.
"What do we name this flame?" whispered the First Mask.
The Second Mask replied:
"A threat."
-------
Back in Realspace – Eastern Marches
The war between the Erelian Hegemony and the Kovari Union had entered its twelfth bloody year.
Millions were dead. Dozens of systems glassed. Alliances formed and shattered like glass towers.
And beneath all of it, the true game unfolded in whispers. Spies traded blood for data. Assassins walked like shadows among rulers. Puppet empires danced to songs they did not compose.
But in the high command chamber of the Kovari flagship Morn's Edge, something else stirred.
An alert. Silent. Obscure.
A hidden protocol, buried in the deepest code of the Empire's espionage network.
The message read only this:
"Subject 7: Off the leash."
General Rathan Korr leaned back in his chair, his cybernetic fingers twitching as he reread the words.
"And so the nightmare begins again."
-------
Meanwhile—Seven Walked
The desert gave way to stone forests—bizarre petrified trees that howled in the wind. He passed through them like a rumor, his cloak stolen from a dead guard fluttering behind him.
He did not speak.
He did not sleep.
But within his mind, a map formed.
Not of terrain. Of power.
He was beginning to feel them—like lights across a vast plain.
Some of those lights pulsed with kindness.
Others with hunger.
And a few—very few—did not pulse at all. They simply waited.
He felt drawn to one such blank space. Not absence—but concealment.
He followed that gravity like a moth.