The stars remember everything.
Even after a thousand empires crumble to ash, after their war chants fade and their names are erased, the stars remember. They hold the echoes of prayers once whispered aboard broken ships and the screams of kings who thought they could silence the cosmos.
But memory is not mercy.
Kael stood at the edge of the monastery cliff, staring into the Nebulon Rift—a massive tear in the fabric of the galaxy where no light escaped, no signal returned. The void pulsed like a silent wound across the starscape, humming with a presence that couldn't be explained. Even the wind here moved differently, whispering in strange patterns that made birds vanish and priests go mad.
He didn't fear the Rift. He feared what remembered him from inside it.
Wrapped in a tattered gray robe, Kael shifted the cracked telescope slightly, adjusting the lens to better study the flickering object that had appeared hours ago—just beyond the usual distortion line. It shimmered with irregular pulses, like a star having a seizure. He'd tracked these anomalies before, but this one was different. Closer. Sharper.
Watching.
Behind him, the monastery groaned like an old creature in its final sleep. The once-mighty Temple of Trinaxis, built on ancient crystalline rock, was a ruin now. Its marble halls were cracked and sunken, its priests long dead or gone mad in the years following the Collapse. Only Kael remained—an orphan left by the final transport ship fifteen cycles ago.
He was never meant to be here this long.
Kael turned back toward the inner sanctum, the one place even the old monks had sealed off. A cracked wall, covered in vines and half-buried under rubble, had shifted days ago during a tremor. Behind it, he'd found a staircase leading down into pure blackness—and a door humming with forgotten energy.
Today, something pulled him back to it.
---
The sanctum air was thick, humming like a storm held in breath. Kael ran his hand along the curved stone wall, fingers tingling with static as he descended. Symbols he'd never been taught—star-marks, angular spirals, shapes that danced if stared at too long—glowed faintly on the walls. They pulsed with each step he took.
At the bottom, a single door waited. It was seamless, metal that rippled like water, with no handle or key. Last time, it hadn't opened.
This time, as he stepped closer, it… responded.
A whisper filled the chamber. Not sound—feeling. Like something brushing the inside of his mind.
"You have returned. The Shard remembers."
His heart lurched. He hadn't heard a voice—he had felt it.
Kael raised his hand without thinking, and the door melted away. A sphere of starlight hovered in the center of the room beyond, surrounded by stone plinths. On each plinth, fragments of glowing script danced in the air, forming and unforming.
He stepped inside.
The light shifted. A beam arced from the sphere to his chest.
Kael screamed.
Visions exploded in his mind—machines that bled fire, a serpent made of stars coiled around a burning throne, an obsidian tower piercing a sun. He saw a child swallowed by a black wave, only to rise with eyes like galaxies.
And a book—bound in voidlight, etched with a single mark:
✦
Then, darkness.
---
He woke to sirens screaming overhead.
The monastery ceiling shook violently. Dust rained down. Kael stumbled to his feet as a voice crackled from an ancient comm node—one he didn't even know still worked.
> "This is Inquisitor-Class vessel Seraph of Silence. We have detected an Astral Codex signal breach. This facility is now under Galactic Protocol Seizure. Evacuation is not authorized."
His blood turned to ice.
They were coming for him.
---
Outside, the night sky lit up with falling stars—only they weren't stars. They were dropships. Sleek, black, angular. Engines silent. Inquisitors. Agents of the Codex Silence. Trained to erase any trace of forbidden knowledge.
Kael ran.
He didn't know where. His body was moving before his thoughts caught up. The monastery's lower tunnels twisted and shifted, parts of them responding to his touch now. Doors opened that had never opened. Hallways lit up in soft blue light, guiding him like veins in a living body.
At the end of one passage, an old mech-sentinel—long dormant—snapped awake. Its eyes flashed violet.
> "Codex Host Detected. Fallback Protocol: Aether Gate Activation."
A platform behind it shimmered. A circle of light appeared—pulsing, unstable, like a wormhole barely clinging to existence.
> "Enter now. They are here."
Kael turned to look back once. Flames were blooming in the upper monastery. The sound of boots, heavy and rhythmic, echoed through the stone.
He stepped into the light.
---
✦
And vanished.