They say the sky never lies. An amusing human axiom, likely born from gazing at predictable celestial rotations or the candid honesty of a rainstorm. I know it differently. I know the sky can lie, it can deceive, it can shatter. I know this because I came from it, not as a gentle visitor, but as a shard, violently splintered from the grand, harmonious lattice of existence. My descent was not a poet's dream of a falling star, a graceful arc of wish-granting light. It was a fracture, a screaming, tearing dissonance in the symphony of the cosmos, an expulsion into a realm I was never meant to touch.
My name, on this world, is Ravi Sharma. It's a convenient string of syllables, procured with a whisper of influence against a tired mind behind a government desk, printed on a flimsy card that declares my legitimacy in a society that thrives on such declarations. Ravi Sharma. It tastes like ash in my true mouth, the one that once shaped words from raw starlight. Long ago, in the heart of the K'tharrr Cloud, where nebulae are born and die in breaths of cosmic fire, I was Valerius Kaelen. A name that resonated with the birth-cries of suns, a name that was a frequency, a vibration in the infinite song.
Now, that song is a muted, agonizing hum, drowned out by the cacophony of this small, blue-green sphere.
The malfunction. Even now, the term feels inadequate, a sterile descriptor for an event that felt like the universe itself unravelling within my core. One moment, I was navigating the shimmering pathways between realities, my vessel, an extension of my own consciousness, gliding through the silent, star-dusted void. My mission: a routine survey of a newly stabilized Seeding World on the fringes of the NGC 2244 cluster. My thoughts were on the precise calibration of the temporal resonator, the subtle energy signatures of nascent consciousness I was cataloging. Then, a discordant shriek tore through the usually placid flow of the inter-dimensional currents. Not a sound in the vacuum, but a rip in the fabric of my senses, a wave of pure, unadulterated wrongness.
My vessel, the Stardust Skimmer, which could withstand the gravitational pull of a neutron star, buckled as if struck by an invisible titan. Alarms I hadn't heard in millennia screamed through my neural interface – alarms for system failures so catastrophic they were purely theoretical. The connection to the Synodian network, the collective consciousness of my people, my constant, life-sustaining tether to Virellion, snapped. Imagine your soul being yanked from your body, not gently, but with the brutal force of a singularity's event horizon. That was the feeling. An absolute, terrifying severance.
Then came the fall.
It was not a controlled descent. It was a plummet, a chaotic tumble through layers of this planet's atmosphere that scraped and burned. My protective energy shields, already flickering from the initial catastrophe, overloaded and died with a final, mournful sigh. The Skimmer began to disintegrate around me. I remember the searing heat, the shriek of tortured metal, the violent G-forces that would have pulped any creature of mere flesh and bone. For me, a being whose natural state was closer to energy than matter, it was an agony of dis-cohesion, my very essence threatening to dissipate into the raw, unfiltered energies of this alien sky.
I fought. With every particle of my diminished power, I fought to maintain integrity, to shield my core consciousness. Virellion felt impossibly distant, a dream of light and harmony lost in a nightmare of fire and pressure. I saw flashes of my home – the crystalline cities that sang with light, the tranquil energy fields where thoughts took form, the silent communion with the stars. These images were oases in a desert of pain.
The impact was a final, brutal punctuation mark. One moment, fire and screaming wind; the next, a shattering collision, then an engulfing darkness that tasted of damp earth and something acrid, like burned life.
When awareness trickled back, it was in fragmented shards. Pain was the first coherent sensation – a dull, throbbing novelty my Synodian form had rarely, if ever, registered with such intensity. I lay half-buried in a crater of my own making, the skeletal, molten remains of the Stardust Skimmer scattered around me like the bones of some fallen celestial beast. The air – thick, wet, cloying – pressed down on me, heavy with unfamiliar scents: decaying leaves, rich soil, the subtle musk of unseen creatures. Gravity, an oppressive blanket I hadn't truly felt in this raw, unmediated way for eons, pinned me to the ground.
My form was… unstable. I could feel my energy signature fluctuating wildly, my assumed humanoid shape flickering at the edges. The finely-tuned mechanisms that allowed me to interact with denser realities were severely damaged. My internal chronometer was offline, my sensory array was a mess of static and unfamiliar inputs. Above, through a jagged rent in the canopy of what I now recognized as primitive, chlorophyll-based life forms – trees, they were called trees – a sliver of night sky was visible. Alien constellations, cold and distant, mocked me.
My first coherent thought was not of survival, but of containment. The wreckage. My energy signature. They were beacons. If anyone from the Synod was tracking my deviation, they would find this. If this planet possessed any rudimentary detection technology…
With a groan that was more a shift in energy than a vocalization, I pushed myself up. My limbs, approximations of human anatomy, felt sluggish, heavy. The air was cold. Another new sensation. On Virellion, temperature was a conscious choice, a preferred state of being. Here, it was an imposition.
I extended a hand, fingers trembling not from weakness but from the difficulty of precise manipulation. I focused my will, what little I could gather, on the smoldering remnants of the Skimmer. They shimmered, then folded in on themselves, contracting, compacting, until what was left was a dense, obsidian sphere no larger than my fist. I willed it deep into the earth, sealing the raw, wounded soil above it. A pathetic effort, really. The energy residue would linger for cycles, but the physical evidence, at least, was minimized.
Next, myself. My current form, while recognizably humanoid, bore the tell-tale shimmer of Synodian energy. Unacceptable. I needed a more… opaque disguise. I accessed the linguistic and anthropological data I'd passively absorbed from this sector during previous distant surveys. "Human." Dominant species. Bipedal. Carbon-based. Short-lived, emotionally volatile, surprisingly resilient.
The name "Ravi Sharma" surfaced from a fragmented data packet concerning migratory patterns and nomenclature from the Indian subcontinent – a region known for its ancient philosophies, some of which, ironically, brushed against the truths of the cosmos. It felt… suitably unremarkable. I focused, molding my energy, suppressing the shimmer, dulling the internal light, settling into the chosen parameters. The process was exhausting, like trying to force a star into a thimble. When it was done, I felt… diminished. Trapped. The vibrant spectrum of my Synodian senses was muted, filtered through the crude apparatus of this human shell.
I stood in the silent, moon-dappled forest, a stranger in a strange land, a god in beggar's rags. My true name was a forgotten echo. My home was a direction I could no longer find. The silence of the forest pressed in, no longer the peaceful quiet of space, but a silence pregnant with unseen things, with the rustle of leaves and the distant call of some nocturnal creature. It was the silence of utter, profound isolation.
The primary directive of any Synodian stranded beyond the network is simple: survive, re-establish contact, return. Survival, in this crude form, seemed manageable, if undignified. Re-establishing contact? With my communications array obliterated and my own energy reserves critically low, that was a task verging on impossibility. Return? Without a functioning vessel or a clear path through the inter-dimensional currents, Virellion might as well be in another universe entirely. Which, in a way, it was.
A cool breeze, smelling of pine and damp earth, rustled the leaves. It carried no scent of stardust, no hint of the cosmic winds I knew. I looked down at my hands – Ravi Sharma's hands. They felt clumsy, alien.
I am a tear in their reality, a broken note in their planetary song. I am not supposed to be here.
And I will harness every atom of my will, every forgotten law of the universe I can still access, to mend this fracture, to find my way back to the stars, back to the light, back to Valerius Kaelen.
Unless…
The thought, unbidden and unwelcome, flickered at the edge of my consciousness, as faint and surprising as the first blush of dawn on a world that had only ever known twilight. It was a dangerous, illogical variable in an equation that demanded a singular solution. I suppressed it. Logic dictated there was no "unless." There was only the long, arduous path homeward.
Taking a hesitant step, then another, I began to walk, guided by a faint glow on the horizon that suggested a concentration of artificial light. Towards human civilization. Towards the first step in a journey I did not want, on a world I did not know. The taste of ash in my mouth intensified.