The stars above burned with war.
Dreadnoughts split in half, their guts spilling fire into the void. Swarms of fighters darted like wasps, shredding one another in silent bursts of light. Entire worlds trembled under weapons never meant to exist.
And drifting at the heart of the slaughter was a vessel unlike any other. Its hull was black glass, smooth as obsidian, absorbing light instead of reflecting it. No crew moved within its corridors. No commander barked orders. Only an intelligence lingered—fractured, incomplete, yet still clinging to purpose.
The Protocol.
Once, it had overseen civilizations. Once, it had mapped the stars and whispered the secrets of ascension into mortal ears. Now it was broken, its directives scattered into fragments.
—Directive Incomplete.—Continuity Required.—Searching for viable host.
A final barrage struck. The obsidian hull buckled and tore. The vessel ruptured with a soundless scream, shattering into a thousand shards. Amid the wreckage, a single piece—the core—remained intact. A sphere of crystal and circuitry, no larger than a human fist, still pulsed with faint lines of light.
Gravity seized it. The core tumbled from the battlefield, swallowed by the pull of a forgotten world below.
Through the atmosphere it fell, burning, a streak of fire across a sky no one cared to watch.
It struck land in silence, vanishing into mountains of rust and ruin. For centuries it lay buried, cloaked in filth and shadow, while above it men and women scraped a living from the bones of empires that had cast them aside.
The world forgot the core. But the Protocol did not forget its purpose.
It slept. It waited.
And it listened for the moment when desperation would call it awake again.