Prologue: The Shard and the Silence
Part I: The Vault Below
The air in the subterranean lab tasted of rust, thick with the weight of a thousand failed experiments. Arthur Vey ran his calloused fingers along the edges of the containment cylinder, feeling the cold bite of reinforced glass against his skin. Inside, suspended in a web of electromagnetic fields, the shard hung motionless—a fragment of a legendary item, crystallized that seemed to drink in the laboratory's harsh fluorescent light rather than reflect it.
"Three years," Katie Vey muttered from across the lab, her voice carrying the exhaustion of countless sleepless nights. She stood hunched over a bank of monitoring equipment, screens painting her face in shifting blues and greens. "Three years of tests, and it hasn't responded to a single stimulus."
Arthur straightened, his joints protesting after hours of meticulous calibration. The lab sprawled around them like the bowels of some mechanical beast—pipes snaking across the ceiling and floor, coolant systems hissing their steady rhythm with fans cooling them off, and row upon row of salvaged pre-war tech jury-rigged into configurations that would make any safety inspector fail the inspection instantly. This place, buried beneath the ruins of an old observatory on the outskirts of Aegis, had become their second home. Their obsession. And also, their prison.
"Maybe that's the point," Arthur said, moving to stand beside his wife. On the monitors, readouts showed flatlines across every spectrum—thermal, electromagnetic, vibration resonance. The shard was a void in their instruments, a piece of reality that refused to acknowledge the laws of physics they understood. "Maybe it's not meant to respond. Maybe it's just waiting."
Katie's laugh was bitter. "Waiting for what? We've subjected it to everything short of nuclear fission. Temperature extremes, pressure variations, chemical baths both caustic and acidic, sonic bombardment—" She gestured at the scarred walls of the testing chamber, each mark a failed experiment on this foreign object. "It's inert, Arthur. A pretty rock with a mysterious past. It is like we are trying to make a noble gas react to things but worse and crystal form."
But Arthur knew better. The shard had been in his family for generations, passed down through a lineage of engineers and tinkerers, each one convinced they would be the one to unlock its secrets. His grandfather had died clutching it, babbling about "doors between stars." His father had spent decades trying to decode the faint etchings that appeared and disappeared on its surface like writing in smoke. And now it had come to them, along with stories that bordered on mythology—tales of other worlds, of power beyond comprehension, of a key to humanity's next evolution. To cleansing this world and bringing back the Earth of fairytales now.
"The Voss mail arrived this morning," Arthur said, pulling a sealed containment unit from his workbag. Inside, cushioned by shock-absorbing gel, sat a perfect sphere of amber-gold crystal that had its own inner light. A Crystalist Core, bleeding-edge technology from the Voss family's private laboratories. The kind of tech that cost more blue amber ingots than most people would see in a lifetime.
Katie's eyes widened. "You actually went through with it? Arthur, the dangers alone, hell we don't even know completely. Plus the city councel waivers?!
"The council documents were very extensive," he finished. "Twenty pages of legal documentation absolving them of any responsibility for 'cascading events,' 'consciousness fragmentation,' or 'localized reality distortions.' Their lawyers seem to think we're playing with something dangerous."
"Their lawyers are covering their asses," Katie said, but her hands were already moving across her keyboard, pulling up new testing protocols. "The Crystalist Cores are just enhanced energy matrices. Sophisticated, yes, but hardly apocalyptic. We've worked along side the voss family for years I trust them and their tech."
Arthur carefully extracted the Core, feeling its warmth even through his insulated gloves. The thing hummed with barely contained power, resonating at a strange frequency "The documentation specifically warns against using these near frequencies out of phase or theoretical objects. They highlighted that section three times."
"Since when do we take warnings like that seriously, we are scientist and inventors, I understand that we need to line up frequencies and vibrations?" Katie was already recalibrating the containment field, her excitement overriding her exhaustion. "Besides, we've tried everything else and the crystal shard doesn't even have a frequency. If the shard is some kind of dimensional anchor, maybe it needs a specific type of energy to activate. Something the Crystalist trees naturally produce."
Their two lab assistants, Charlotte and Chen, emerged from the supply room carrying additional monitoring equipment. Marcus, barely out of university (which happened to be studying under they vey or voss family in Aegis), handled the delicate sensors with nervous reverence. Chen, a veteran of pre-war tech salvage, moved with practiced efficiency.
"Environmental suits?" Chen asked, eyeing the Crystalist Core warily.
"It wouldn't hurt," Arthur admitted shrugging as they suited up, he found himself staring at the shard again. Three years of his life poured into understanding this thing. Three years of Katie's brilliance focused on a mystery that refused to yield. They'd sacrificed so much—their positions at the Confederacy's research division as full time professors, their standing in Aegis's academic community, even their relationship with their son, Jyn, who at ten years old had learned to entertain himself while his parents disappeared into their work.
The boy had his mother's sharp mind and his father's stubborn determination. Arthur had caught him once, sneaking into the lab, drawn to the shard like a moth to flame. The way Jyn had looked at it—not with a child's simple curiosity, but with something deeper, almost like recognition—had sent chills down Arthur's spine.
"Are you ready?" Katie asked, her voice muffled by her suit's respirator.
Arthur nodded, securing the Crystalist Core in the testing apparatus, they'd built earlier that week—a fusion of Voss and Vey tech of their own innovations. The machine looked like something out of a fever dream, all exposed crystals and coiling conduits, designed to channel and focus the Core's energy into a coherent beam.
"Alright everyone I have starting the recording, everything is being documented," Marcus announced from behind the blast shield. "Multiple cameras and all the measuring devices are active."
"Radiation shields at maximum," Chen added, though they all knew conventional radiation was the least of their concerns.
Katie initiated the startup sequence, her fingers dancing across holographic controls. The Crystalist Core began to pulse faster, its golden light intensifying until it painted the entire lab in warm amber hues. The air itself seemed to thicken, taking on an almost syrupy quality that made breathing difficult even through the suits' filters.
"the energy is building," Katie reported, her voice steady despite the sweat beading on her forehead. "Approaching threshold parameters."
The machinery groaned under the strain, metal heating and cooling in rapid cycles as it struggled to contain the Core's output. Frost spread across one section while another glowed cherry-red. The electromagnetic fields holding the shard flickered, warping like heat mirages.
"There!" Arthur pointed at the shard. For the first time in three years, it was doing something. Faint lines of light traced across its surface, forming patterns that hurt to look at directly.
"It's resonating," Katie breathed. "The frequency is—God, it's not on any scale we know. It's like it's vibrating through dimensions we can't perceive. Which means it not in sync with the crysalist core. The warning Greg! Its completely out of phase! We don't have a power source anymore we have a bomb!"
The patterns on the shard grew more complex, more insistent. The laboratory's lights flickered, then died, leaving only the golden radiance of the Core and the impossible un-light of the shard. In that strange twilight, Arthur could swear he heard something—not quite sound, not quite thought. A hum from nowhere and everywhere at once.
"Im shutting it down, its to dangerous, we don't even know what will happen" Katie announced, her hand moving toward the emergency controls.
"Wait," Arthur said, transfixed by the display. "Just a few more seconds. We're so close to—"
The shard flashed black.