The first time the Lythrons attacked, they came from the jungle shadows like thunder erupting in silence. Tall, sinewy creatures with iridescent chitin, they struck the outer research outpost with blinding speed and eerie coordination.
No survivors.
Surveillance drones captured only glimpses—clawed limbs, glowing eyes, and pulses of bioluminescent signals flaring across their exoskeletons like Morse code in a forgotten language.
The Colonial Authority labeled them hostile. Planet Kharon-4 was declared a restricted zone, marked red on every interstellar map. But beneath the fear and bloodshed, some suspected there was more to the Lythrons than mere savagery.
Zaryans Myles was one of them. Though a Zaryan by nature, she transmigrated into the Lythron space and body upon their invasion and they never knew. Excellent in learning their codes and lifestyle, he quickly adapted. By now he had learnt almost everything about them, helping hugely in connecting them to humans.
A xenolinguist by training and a diplomat by heart, Zaryans had spent years studying alien behavioral patterns across the settled systems. He believed the Lythrons weren't mindless killers, but intelligent beings with a language humans had yet to understand.
Where others saw threat, he saw mystery. Being an alien with a human body, he understands better than humans.
After two failed military expeditions and a diplomatic outreach turned massacre, Zaryans proposed a radical idea: approach not with soldiers, but with listeners. She would lead a small, unarmed team deep into Lythron territory, equipped with a neural resonance interface capable of interpreting emotional frequencies, essentially a translator of thought and feeling.
Most thought she was insane. A suicide mission. The Colonial Authority reluctantly approved it, under the condition that she accept two security escorts and a bio-containment override.
"I'm not going there to conquer," Zaryans told them. "I'm going to learn." His learning never stops. Athan is there to lead and give instructions, he's there to learn and share instructions.
They touched down at the edge of the Verdant Womb—an area the Lythrons had defended with terrifying consistency. The jungle here was alive in ways human eyes could barely process. Such needed a species like him.
Trees swayed without wind. Fungi blinked. Vines sang with low-frequency hums, resonating with the movements of the creatures that lived there.
And the Lythrons came.
Not immediately, but soon. They stepped from the foliage like living ghosts, three of them, each over eight feet tall, with long limbs, curved mandibles, and armored bodies that rippled with shifting lights. Red. Blue. Gold. Anger. Caution. Curiosity. The resonance device flickered with chaotic feedback. Then, silence.
Zaryans held his ground.
"I come in peace," he said quietly, though the words were for himself more than them.
He activated the device. Soft pulses of translated emotion flowed outward—non-threatening intentions, empathy, trust.
The Lythrons froze.
Then one stepped forward. Its light dimmed to a calming green. It raised a long, clawed hand and touched its fingers to Zaryan's chest. The neural device surged, overwhelmed, then stabilized. In that moment, Zaryans felt them, not just in data, but in sensation.
Loss. Grief. Memory.
The Lythrons had once been a hive-bound species, linked by an organic psychic network. Eons ago, a cosmic event, a meteor, perhaps, or a technological implosion shattered that link. Severed from one another, they became isolated, paranoid, and fiercely protective of what little remained of their collective memory, stored deep in sacred groves and crystalline hives.
Humanity's expansion has been an unintentional desecration.
"They aren't attacking," Zaryans whispered. "They're mourning."
"You keep discovering new secrets," Athan relayed back in a whisper,
What followed was slow and delicate work. Days turned to weeks as his team camped near the forest's edge, using the resonance device to exchange primitive emotional concepts. Fear. Safety. Curiosity. Respect. Then more complex ideas: Memory. Legacy. Harmony.
The Lythrons began to respond with their own signals, flashes of shared images, vibrations in the air, even shared dreams.
That's when Vael came in.
He was unlike the others. Older. Taller. Scars traced across his thorax like ancient calligraphy. He never spoke, but his presence was commanding.
Vael approached Zoryans one quiet, rainy evening and his aim, to send him a vision. It was an ancient Lythron city made of light and stone, abandoned and overgrown. A broken connection between their kind and the world they once harmonized with.
"We don't want humanity gone," he said to Zoryans. "I and my species want to be remembered. Understood." His deep voice grazed the entire space. Zoryans was listening, taking down the records.
"We need someone to help us reconnect the broken strands of their hivemind—a new link. A new future." Vael said.
"And that man is no one other than Athan." Vael declared boldly. "But if he fails in his mission, we will have no option than to erase the humans out."
The reason as to why they wanted this was a great mystery which could only be revealed in the future talked of, the future Athan was living temporarily.
"What happens if he succeeds in his mission?" Zoryans asked.
"If it's worth it, I can help him make a promise that he will fulfill it."
Vael opens his system, a visionary projection which could teleport into a real realm. Zoryans was granted immediate access.
And the reality of that world began to flow before his eyes, directly relaying to Athan's monitors from his station.
[The Colonial Authority, still wary, agreed to support a limited cooperative effort. A new settlement was built, not over the Lythron groves, but beside them. Called Virelia, it was designed to respect the land's rhythm: living structures grown from genetically tuned flora, energy pulled from the natural bioluminescent ecosystem rather than artificial grids.]
[Lythrons taught humans how to coexist with the environment. Humans shared their tools and understanding of medicine, repair, and memory preservation.]
[The resonance devices evolved. Within five years, human children learned to read the Lythron light language as fluently as speech. Emotional interfaces were implanted in schools and public centers. The need for weapons vanished.]
[It wasn't a perfect process. Misunderstandings happened. But where once there was blood, now there were conversations. Apologies. Progress.]
[Zoryans stayed, no longer as a researcher, but as a bridge between two worlds–humans and aliens. He and Vael, though so different in form and origin, would form a bond closer than any human friendship. This would be called a "shared thread," a term Zoryans coined the day he realized he no longer feared the Lythrons, but saw himself among them.]
[Ten years later, on the anniversary of the first contact, a festival lit the skies of Virelia. Humans and Lythrons walked side by side through glowing gardens. Children painted each other's skin with patterns of color that meant joy, celebration, and unity.]
[Zoryans stood at the highest terrace, his eyes reflecting the colors of the lights below. Beside him, Vael standing for the Lythrons stood still, his body pulsing a steady golden rhythm—peace.]
"I never imagined this," he said softly as the projections stopped. "Not like this. This is really much better than any human could expect."
Vael turned toward him. A low hum escaped his body, translated by the neural interface as:
"This is all dependent if your leader will be successful in his mission. The effect of failure would be far worse than its success equivalent."
Athan shrieked in shock from where he stayed as Zoryans relayed all audio real time to him.
It hit really deep on him that the destiny of the world rested on his shoulders now.
"You've heard right?" Zoryans relayed to him.
[How you go about it starting from now determines the status of humans in the next few or many years.]
Then his vision shattered, cutting him off from the future; he got the privilege to live in the moment. He was back to the PRESENT, his 13 year old self.
Darkness swallowed him. Then—light.
He opened his eyes to a smaller world. His room. His old room. Posters of spacecraft clung to the walls, half-peeled. The buzzing fan rattled above him. His hands, smaller, softer. His chest, thinner. He scrambled to the cracked mirror by his bedside.
A boy stared back at him. Wide-eyed. Thirteen years old.
"No—ooo" he groaned. His voice cracked higher, thinner. "This— this can't be real."
"You've heard right?" Zoryans' last words echoed faintly in his brain, like a memory bleeding across lifetimes. All those now faded, a realistic illusion, what will occur in his future.
A little voice echoed to him:
THE DESTINY OF HUMANITY RESTS ON YOUR PERFORMANCE.
YOUR CHOICES WILL DETERMINE HUMAN EXTINCTION OR SURVIVAL.
Athan's chest heaved. He wasn't just a boy anymore. He was the transition of two timelines—THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.
THE RESONANT.
If the Aliens species wouldn't agree to merge peacefully with humans, then he will have no other choice but to fight them.
And the countdown had just begun.
A very dangerous mission but humanity is at the brink of extinction.