The sky split open, and fire rained down.
One moment, Kaelan Walker was on his knees in the dust of the Grim Hollow asteroid mine, his palms raw and bleeding as he pried a chunk of low-grade Stardust ore from the unyielding rock. The next, the world erupted in a scream of metal and stone.
A searing white light—silent, absolute, unforgiving—vaporized the mine's eastern sector in the blink of an eye. The shockwave hit him like a giant's fist, slamming him against the jagged rock wall. Agony exploded in his ribs; he tasted blood, hot and coppery, on his tongue. The air turned to a suffocating soup—thick with dust, the iron tang of spilled blood, and the acrid stench of plasma fire and ozone.
This was no meteor strike. The geometry was too precise, the destruction too clean.
Orbital bombardment.
"Mom… Dad…" The words were a bloody croak in his throat. Their shift had ended minutes earlier. They'd be in the cluster of prefab habitats on the surface—dead center of the blast zone.
A low, thrumming hum vibrated through the rock beneath him. Out of the settling dust stepped figures: tall, imposing, clad in iridescent chitin-like armor, their faceless helms glowing with a single menacing red optic. Their weapons, sleek and humming with lethal energy, were trained on the cowering miners.
Xen'thari Raiders.
Every spacer in the Rim knew the tales. Slavers. Reavers. A blight that haunted the dark between the stars. They did not conquer—they harvested.
A Xen'thari warrior, larger and more imposing than the rest, stepped forward. In its clawed hand, it held a pulsing, sickly-purple orb. It raised the orb, and a beam of violet light lanced out, scanning the huddled survivors. Where the light touched, screams tore through the air—bodies convulsed, then went limp, eyes glassy and empty of all life. Not killed. Husked. Their consciousness, their very souls, siphoned away to fuel some unfathomable alien machine.
The beam swept toward Kaelan's hiding place.
Cold, absolute fear froze him to the bone. This was it. This was how the forgotten ones of the Rim died—unmourned, unremembered, reduced to fuel for monsters.
Then, a different heat flared in his chest.
Not the searing heat of plasma fire. This was older. Deeper. A cold fire, like the heart of a neutron star, burning slow and unyielding.
The jagged, unremarkable grey stone that had hung around his neck since infancy—his only inheritance from the parents he never knew—suddenly blazed with unbearable heat. Then it shattered.
A shard, no larger than a thumbnail, glowed with molten blue light, impossibly bright, and melted straight into his sternum.
Agony. A universe being born and dying inside his ribcage.
Visions detonated behind his eyes: a woman with hair like swirling starlight, tears streaming down her face as she placed a blue-sharded necklace around a whimpering baby's neck; a dark god, its laughter echoing through the void, sealing her away in a prison of shattered reality; a name, whispered across the chasm of eternity: Ella.
Mother.
The purple scan-beam hit him.
And shattered into a thousand harmless motes of light.
The lead Xen'thari's head tilted—a gesture of pure, mechanical confusion. It raised the orb again, powering it to a piercing whine that set Kaelan's teeth on edge.
Kaelan stared at his hands. Under the grime and blood, his veins were lighting up from within, tracing rivers of cerulean fire beneath his skin. The pain was a white-hot brand seared into his soul, but beneath it… beneath it was a current. A power vast, silent, and hungry. It whispered of cosmic winds and dying suns, of supernovas and black holes, of forces beyond mortal comprehension.
The memory of his foster father, Artur, flashed through his mind—calloused hands adjusting his stance, voice rough but kind. "Don't aim for the face, boy. Aim through it."
The Xen'thari fired—a thicker, more violent beam of soul-scouring energy, crackling with purple lightning.
Kaelan didn't think. He pushed.
Not with his hands. With the cold, starry furnace now blazing in his core.
A crescent wave of raw, blue-white energy erupted from his outstretched palm—like a shard of the galaxy's edge made manifest. It was silent, so powerful it unmade sound itself. It met the purple beam and consumed it, then kept going. It passed through the Xen'thari warrior, its orb, and the two raiders behind it without a single sound.
For a heartbeat, nothing. Then, the raiders disintegrated. Not into gore, but into shimmering, crystalline ash that hung in the charged air before drifting gently to the ground. Their armor, their weapons, their very bodies—unmade by starlight.
Silence. Heavier than the dust. Thicker than the blood in the air.
Every surviving miner, every remaining Xen'thari, stared at the lone, bloodied young man standing in the ruin, blue light still dripping from his fingertips like liquid lightning.
Then, chaos. The miners, seeing a miracle, found their courage and scrambled for cover or weapons. The remaining Xen'thari, their dispassionate programming overridden by a primal threat response, turned their weapons as one.
But Kaelan saw none of them. His eyes were locked on the colossal figure that had fired the orbital cannon. The Captain. Its red optic fixed on him, and a massive rotary plasma cannon whirred to life on its arm, barrels spinning faster and faster.
The star-power inside Kaelan flickered violently. It was a dam on the verge of bursting, a star on the cusp of nova. He had no idea how to control it. He was a lit match in a powder keg.
The Captain's cannon barrel glowed a hellish orange, heat washing over Kaelan even from meters away.
Deep in the void, aboard a monolithic vessel of impossible scale hidden within a fold of spacetime, a being of shadow and ancient malice opened eyes that held the light of a thousand dying suns. It felt a tremor in the fabric of reality—a signature it had not sensed in ten thousand years. A spark it thought it had extinguished forever.
On a forgotten asteroid in the farthest reaches of the Rim, a shard of the Primordial Core had awakened.
A smile—cruel, cold, and infinite—spread across its featureless face.
"Found you," whispered the Dark Star God, its voice a poison that seeped into the very veins of the cosmos.
Back in the mine, a synthetic female voice—devoid of emotion yet imbued with an impossible weight of age—spoke directly into Kaelan's buckling mind:
[Host's biological matrix has stabilized. Genetic lock released. Bloodline legacy: Progenitor of Stars initialized.]
[Assimilating local stellar radiation...]
[Core Fragment Integration: 1%]
[Warning: Host's physical vessel is at critical stress. Catalyzing emergency evolution.]
New agony—different from before, a scalding, bone-deep pain that restructured his cells, his blood, his very DNA—ripped through him. He screamed, collapsing to one knee as the world dissolved into a maelstrom of blue fire and system prompts.
The Xen'thari Captain's cannon reached a deafening whine, fully charged.
It fired.
A torrent of molten plasma—wide enough to engulf three men—roared down the tunnel, melting the rock walls to glass as it advanced. It was death, inevitable and absolute.
Through the haze of pain and alien data, Kaelan's survival instinct screamed. He raised both hands, not knowing what he was doing, only that he had to push back.
The star-furnace in his chest roared to life.
A shield of shimmering hexagonal blue light—like a fragment of a star's own corona—snapped into existence mere meters before him.
The plasma torrent slammed into it.
The sound was the end of the world. Light, heat, and force exploded outward, shredding the remaining mining equipment and hurling Xen'thari and miners alike like ragdolls. Kaelan was driven back, his boots carving deep trenches in the rock, the shield flickering wildly but holding fast.
For three endless seconds, he held back the sun.
Then the barrage ceased. The shield winked out of existence. Kaelan crumpled to his hands and knees, gasping for air, his vision swimming with black spots. The system voice echoed, faint but insistent:
[Evolution catalyzed. Durability enhanced. Stellar Cohesion: 12%. Warning: Cohesion below 15%. Host is vulnerable to core instability.]
Through the steam and smoke, the Xen'thari Captain strode forward, unharmed. Its single red optic studied him, cold and analytical. It raised a clawed hand, and a serrated energy blade ignited with a vicious snarl from its forearm—long, sharp, and dripping with lethal energy.
It was done playing.
Kaelan tried to summon the power again, but the well felt empty, distant. He was spent. The Captain closed the distance, the killing blade raised high for a final, decisive strike.
A high-pitched whine—different from plasma weapons, a sound of tearing metal and screaming hydraulics—echoed from a shattered vent shaft above.
A figure, sleek and silver, crashed through the ceiling in an explosion of debris, landing between Kaelan and the Xen'thari Captain in a three-point crouch. Not a machine. A suit of power armor—a mech—but unlike any Kaelan had ever seen. Humanoid, slender yet impossibly strong, with glowing amber lines tracing its form like veins of liquid fire. It carried no obvious weapon.
The mech's head turned slightly, its single large optic scanning Kaelan for a millisecond. A synthesized female voice—crisp, efficient, and laced with static—crackled from an external speaker:
"Unidentified high-energy biosignature. Designation: Asset. Priority: Protect."
The mech turned to face the towering Xen'thari Captain, its hands coming up, fingers splayed. Amber energy crackled between its palms, growing brighter by the second.
"Threat assessed. Lethal force authorized."
The Xen'thari Captain roared and charged, its energy blade a blur of death.
The silver mech didn't flinch.
It simply moved.
[End of Chapter 1]