The void was quiet tonight.
Lucian Orien floated among the skeletal husks of warships, his scavenger craft drifting like a beetle across a graveyard of steel. The ruined battlefield orbited the corpse of a collapsed star, its gravity pulling wreckage into a slow, endless spiral toward the abyss at its center. Twisted spires of shattered hulls jutted out like tombstones, and the faint glow of decayed plasma trails etched scars across the darkness.
To anyone else, this place was cursed. To Lucian, it was survival.
"Power readings… dead. Hull integrity… compromised. Still good scrap," he muttered, tapping at the flickering dashboard of his shuttle. He leaned back in his chair, the pale light of the stargrave reflecting against his weary eyes.
At twenty, Lucian already looked older than his years. Grease stains clung to his jacket, his hair was dark and unkempt, and his hands bore the callouses of someone who had known hunger and work far too long. His father used to tell him that his name meant light of the stars. Lucian couldn't remember the last time he felt like it meant anything at all.
Still, the stars had a strange way of holding on to him.
He guided his scavenger shuttle toward the wreckage of a battleship half-buried in the debris field. The once-mighty vessel was broken, its armor peeled back like ribs cracked open. Lucian latched his shuttle to the hull, sealed his helmet, and stepped out into the void.
The silence of space pressed against him, heavy and eternal. His suit's thrusters hissed as he floated toward a breach in the ship's side. Inside, he found nothing but shadows and dust.
"Another corpse," Lucian muttered, shining his wrist-lamp across the corridor. Bodies had long since decomposed or been stripped away by other scavengers. All that remained were hollow shells—helmets, fragments of armor, scorched bones crushed under collapsed beams.
Lucian had seen worse. He kept moving.
Hours passed as he pried open crates, salvaged scraps of alloy, and pulled wires from the walls. Each find was worth barely enough to buy food for a week. Not enough to pay debts. Not enough to dream.
Not enough to live.
He was prying apart a broken terminal when something strange caught his eye. Deep inside the ship's command bridge, behind a cracked viewport staring into the dead star, a faint light flickered.
Lucian froze. Nothing should shine here. Not in the husk of a dead ship.
He followed the glow. It pulsed faintly beneath a collapsed console, almost hidden in the rubble. He pulled debris aside and uncovered it: a shard of crystalline material, about the size of his palm, glowing with a pale, rhythmic light—like a heartbeat.
It was beautiful, unlike anything he had ever seen. Not alloy. Not data crystal. Not fuel core.
It was alive.
Lucian reached for it, and the shard pulsed brighter. A warmth spread across his hand, sinking into his skin like fire. His breath caught as the shard melted, flowing like liquid light, and seeped into his chest.
"No—wait!" he gasped, clawing at himself as the heat burrowed into his heart. His vision blurred, stars spinning, and then—
A voice.
"Child of dust… why do you touch what is lost to eternity?"
Lucian staggered, his knees hitting the deck. The voice wasn't heard—it was felt, inside his bones, reverberating in the emptiness of his mind.
"Wh-what are you?" he rasped. His heart throbbed violently, light searing through his veins. His wrist-lamp shattered, plunging the bridge into darkness—yet he could see. Not with eyes, but with something deeper.
For a moment, he wasn't inside a ship. He was standing on the edge of a vast abyss, and around him stretched the ruins of suns. Giants of fire collapsed into silence. He saw fragments of starlight, shards drifting like embers, each whispering in voices older than time.
The shard inside him pulsed again.
"The Choir has forgotten. The Saints have lied. But you… you will remember."
Lucian collapsed against the console, gasping for air. His visor fogged as sweat dripped down his brow. The light dimmed, fading back into silence, but something remained inside him—an echo.
The shard wasn't gone. It was part of him now.
And it was watching.
Lucian stumbled back toward the corridor, gripping his chest. His body felt different—lighter, heavier, both at once. His suit's readouts flickered with strange anomalies. His pulse was steady, but his blood carried faint traces of radiation no human should survive.
He didn't have time to make sense of it.
Because something else had arrived.
A ripple shivered through the wreckage. Lucian turned toward the viewport, and his stomach dropped.
Outside, cutting across the stargrave, three ships were approaching. Sleek, obsidian craft marked with the silver insignia of the Celestial Synod. Saints' hunters.
His chest tightened. They weren't supposed to be here—not scavenging, not in a graveyard like this.
They were here for the shard.
Lucian bolted. He pushed through corridors, thrusters screaming as he hurled himself back toward his shuttle. His mind raced. He didn't know what the shard was, but if the Synod wanted it—
That meant he was already dead.
He reached the airlock, slammed the controls, and dove into the pilot's seat. The scavenger craft shuddered as he tore free of the battleship's hull. Behind him, the Synod hunters spread their wings of plasma, engines igniting like burning halos.
A transmission crackled through his comms. Cold, authoritative.
"Scavenger craft 17-A, you are in possession of stolen relic property of the Celestial Synod. Power down your vessel and surrender. You will not be harmed."
Lucian's jaw clenched. They weren't asking. They were declaring.
"Like hell," he muttered, slamming the throttle. His scavenger shuttle roared forward, engines straining. The hunters gave chase, weaving through the debris with predatory grace.
The first plasma bolt seared past his hull, grazing the wing. Warning alarms screamed. Lucian gritted his teeth, jerking the controls to thread his craft between jagged wreckage. Shards of metal scraped the hull, sparks scattering across the void.
Another voice whispered inside him, faint but insistent.
"Run, child of dust. Run until you remember what it means to burn."
Lucian snarled. "I don't even know what you are!"
But his hands moved faster. His reflexes sharpened. His eyes tracked the hunters with unnatural clarity, predicting their movements before they made them. The shard wasn't just inside him—it was guiding him.
One hunter closed in, charging its cannons. Lucian twisted the shuttle into a narrow gap between two colossal ship ribs. The hunter followed—too fast, too confident. Lucian yanked the throttle at the last second, diving out.
The hunter slammed into the wreckage and exploded in a storm of fire.
Lucian's heart pounded. He should have been dead—but somehow, he wasn't.
Two hunters remained.
The shard pulsed again. "Choose, Lucian Orien. Run to survive… or burn to ascend."
Lucian grit his teeth, sweat dripping down his brow. He didn't know what "ascend" meant. He didn't know what the Synod truly wanted.
All he knew was that his life had just ended the moment he touched that shard.
And something greater—something terrifying—had just begun.