The voice wasn't a sound. It was a tremor inside my skull, like a whisper echoing through glass.
"Yes… that was me. Are you the heavenfallen?"
I froze. My pistol was still locked to my hip, but every instinct screamed to draw it. Instead, I blinked, focusing on her eyes — blue like glacial fire, glowing faintly even in the wreck's gloom. Her lips didn't move. The voice was inside me again.
"You fell from the sky. The elders spoke of one who would fall in fire."
I rubbed the side of my helmet, shaking my head. "Telepathy… that's impossible. Eva—what the hell am I hearing?"
"Unknown phenomenon," Eva replied, flat as ever. "Auditory centers not engaged. Signal transmission through cortical resonance. Energy signature matches Aether."
"Aether?" I muttered, half to myself. "You mean—magic?"
"Semantic equivalent accepted." The Ai replied cheekily
The wolf-woman flinched at my voice but didn't look away. Her body trembled; blood matted the fur on her arm. The wound where the stimgun had sealed flesh still smoked faintly. I crouched, lowering my tone.
"You can really understand me?"
"A little. The old tongue… my mother taught some words." She spoke haltingly, as if dragging thoughts through water.
"Right," I sighed. "And what's your name, stranger who reads minds?"
Her ears flicked. "Lyra."
I nodded. "Dante. Commander. Human."
She frowned, confusion rippling through her expression. > "Hu…man?"
"Never mind," I said, standing. My joints protested. "You need time to heal... And I need to find out where the hell I am."
I was able to ignore the pain for now, my wounds were 'healed' but not completely. My head had a dull throbbing.
Outside the wreckage, the wind howled like a living thing. The world stretched in all directions — jagged peaks and endless ice plains reflecting a pale sun. Three moons hung above the horizon. One shattered.
I scanned the sky. "Eva, atmospheric readout."
"Breathable. Temperature minus forty-three Celsius. Trace unknown elements. Aether density: abnormal."
"That explains the fireworks," I muttered. My HUD flickered as the AI overlaid faint blue streams across the landscape rivers of invisible energy coursing beneath the snow. It was beautiful… and wrong.
Lyra followed me, limping, wrapped in her torn cloak. Her tail dragged. She glanced at the lights I could see and shivered.
"You see the glow?"
"Yeah. You too?"
"Only the gifted. Those who touch Aether."
I gave a humorless laugh. "Lucky me."
We moved toward a ridge where the wreck's hull had torn open to the storm. The frost glittered with fragments of molten metal, frozen mid-burst like raindrops turned to glass. Halfway up the incline, my leg gave out. Pain flared through my ribs. I caught myself against the ice. Lyra stopped and turned, expression softening for just a moment before she reached out a clawed hand.
"You saved me."
I stared at it, then took her hand. Warm. Alive.
"You're welcome," I said, and let her pull me to my feet.
By nightfall or whatever passed for night on this frozen world we found a cave beneath a jagged overhang. I set a flare on the ground, the light pulsing red against stone. Lyra built a fire from dry lichen and bone shards. The flames shimmered blue.
I frowned. "That's not combustion. That's plasma."
"Aetherfire." She gestured with one claw. "It burns with will. It feeds on life's echo."
I held my left palm near it. My cybernetic fingers buzzed, the sensors flickering. "Eva, scan."
"Energy type: non-thermal. Resonant with neural waveforms." Eva paused briefly "Commander, the fire reacts to your proximity."
I stared as the flame stretched toward my hand, threads of blue curling up my metal arm. For a second, I felt something — like pressure behind my eyes, an ocean of static whispering in a language made of color.
Then it was gone.
Lyra was watching me, ears high, tail stiff. "You can touch it."
"Guess so."
"Only the Aetherborn do that. Are you…?"
"No," I said quickly. "Just unlucky."
She tilted her head. "Heavenfallen are strange."
"Yeah, we get that a lot."
Later, when she slept near the fire, I sat by the cave mouth and looked up. The sky shimmered faintly streaks of aurora swirling around the shattered moon.
Eva's voice murmured softly. "Commander, biological scans of the local fauna confirm partial human DNA signatures."
I went still. "What did you say?"
"Seventy-three percent correlation with baseline human genome. Remaining sequences unknown. Possible mutation from prior contamination."
I looked back at Lyra, sleeping peacefully by the Aetherfire. Her ears twitched in dreams.
"Human…" I whispered. "What the hell is going on?"
Eva didn't answer. The storm outside howled, carrying echoes that almost sounded like screams.