Chapter 1 — Arrival Beneath a Shattered Sky
Flame split the night of the void.
A recovery pod plunged through layered clouds of gold dust, leaving twin streaks across the heavens like falling comets arguing with gravity itself. Below, the Aurora Sanctum turned its twelve rings to follow the descent. Whole continents of alloy moved together; each circle rotated on an opposite axis until the incoming object was centered above the citadel's upper deck.
An impact like thunder. Pressure waves rolled outward, shivering the suspended glass oceans that surrounded the station.
Smoke. Silence. Then the pod's shell unfolded as carefully as a blooming flower, lighting the deck in intermittent flashes.
Inside lay a boy no more than seventeen—bare‑footed, wrapped in nothing but strips of metallic silk. His skin shimmered where the light touched it, veins gleaming as if constellations had been drawn beneath the surface. Two eyes opened, and in them galaxies turned.
He inhaled roughly. The air tasted like metal and ozone.
"What is this place…?"
Before he could rise, shadows elongated across the dock—security drones, scanners, mecha attendants. From their midst stepped a man encased in pale silver armor whose edges breathed static. Sensors along his spine glowed like stars as he raised one hand in greeting.
"I am Orion Kha'el, keeper of this station." His voice carried a dual tone, half‑machine, half‑human. "You, anomaly—what designation carries your code?"
"I… have none." The boy blinked as a string of fractured memory passed like lightning behind his eyes—caverns of bone‑glass, blue genes spiraling, a voice whispering adapt. "My name is… Lin Tian."
The name vibrated through the deck, triggering system diagnostics the Sanctum hadn't run in millennia. Readouts scrolled into being above the pod: Origin Status — Untraced. Gene Signature — Unclassified. Lifespan Estimate — Variable.
Orion studied the data in silence. "Unclassified gene and yet alive after fall through atmospheric drag? Curious. Come. The Director should see this."
He turned, stride measuring the floor's magnetic hum. Lin Tian followed, trembling slightly with each step.
The corridors of the Sanctum were built like a cathedral inside a reactor: spiral arches humming with energy, scripture mixed with circuitry. In every polished wall he caught glimpses of himself—thin, dusty, eyes too bright for his own good.
Workers paused to stare. Muted whispers: "No file… raw body… Is he another clan heir?"
He could not stop them; he couldn't even answer himself.
They reached a circular dais overlooking the twin suns bathing the system. There, suspended in a mesh of photonic ribbons, a woman waited. She was robed in layers of translucent white and silver; her hair spilled to her knees, a living reflection of moonlight. When she turned, the entire deck brightened by degrees.
"Candidate 000," Orion said formally, "your calibration overseer, Yue Xian'er, envoy from the Moon Jade Clan."
The boy's throat went dry. Fairy… The word surfaced unbidden, inadequate.
Yue Xian'er's eyes lingered on him for half a heartbeat longer than protocol allowed. Within their irises swirled a calm gravity, an ocean with its own tides. "He survived unprotected re‑entry? Improbable." Her voice was musical, almost kind. "Bring him to my lab."
The lab was cylindrical, its walls filled with rotating spheres—each a micro‑universe where light behaved according to unique physical rules. Yue Xian'er guided him onto a raised plate of polished crystal.
"Breathe normally," she said. "I'm checking your resonance with the station's axis field."
When her fingers brushed his wrist, a shock of energy leapt through him—not pain but recognition, as though the very air between them remembered an old promise. The spheres around the room pulsed once in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Yue Xian'er raised a brow. "Your body synchronizes faster than any I've seen. It's as if you already know the Sanctum's song."
"I only listened." He forced a small smile. "It's loud."
That earned the faintest ghost of a laugh. "Loud, yes. Do you remember where you came from?"
He hesitated. Pieces of the dungeon flickered—glowing bones, the chrysalis, the voice. Adapt.
"No. Only that I was… ordinary."
Orion tapped a console, studying genetic strands projected above the plate. They twisted like mirrored dragons, red and blue. "Ordinary is hardly the word. These base patterns are incompatible with every taxonomy we possess."
Yue Xian'er leaned over the holo‑display. "Two distinct codes. One appears to rewrite itself as we observe."
The runes under his skin flared softly.
Orion muttered, half to himself, "Unrecorded dual genome… He may be the bridge between datasets—the first stable cross of Forgotten and Starlight. Director Yue, advise caution."
The woman straightened. "He isn't a dataset, Instructor Orion. He's a person."
For the briefest instant, Lin Tian looked up at her—and somewhere in that gaze, an oath formed, quiet and absolute.
Later, when the tests were done and attendants dismissed, the boy stood alone on a balcony that overlooked the twin suns. Their light divided the sky into halves: one gold, one silver. The boundary shimmered like an invisible thread tying day to night.
He whispered to the horizon, perhaps to himself:
"If the stars gave me these eyes, then I'll find the reason before they burn out."
Unseen behind him, Yue Xian'er paused in the doorway. For a moment she considered speaking—some comfort, some warning—but instead she turned away. Her master would call it destiny; she called it danger. Either way, the stars had already chosen.
Above them, the outer ring of the Sanctum rotated once—aligning for the first time in ages so that both suns shone through the same aperture.
A single beam struck Lin Tian's chest, igniting the rune hidden there.
The mark pulsed once, like the quiet heartbeat of something vast awakening far below time.