The stars had always lied to Nobel
He'd chased them across warzones, smuggler routes, and dead systems, hoping to find something more than duty or escape. But here, drifting above the ghost planet Thaless, nobel Vire finally understood the meaning of silence.
His ship, The Daggerfall, blinked its systems offline—again. The gravity coils stuttered. The engine core throbbed like a heart murmuring its final words. And yet, it wasn't the ship failing that unnerved him.
It was the voice.
Soft. Echoing. Ancient.
"Return me, child of the spiral. I remember you."
Nobel slammed his palm against the dashboard. "Nope. Not hearing that. I've been clean for two years—no stims, no mind-drift implants, nothing that should be making me hallucinate."
But the whisper came again. This time, it was clearer. Older than language, yet perfectly understood.
"You were chosen. You always were."
His fingers tightened around the obsidian shard tied to his wrist with frayed wire. The thing wasn't tech—not even close. No interface, no emitters. Just a jagged crystal dug up from the ruins of a moon long forgotten.
The shard pulsed.
And then, the planet below—dead, cold Thaless—lit up like a warning flare.
Glowing rings of sapphire fire spiraled from its core. Nobels sensors, previously dead, now screamed with data. Life signs. Structures. A temple buried under centuries of ash and memory.
He muttered a curse. "Why do the crazy ones always turn out to be right?"
Thaless had been declared quarantined for a reason.
He remembered the rumors: the Spiral Wars, a race of precursors who fought not with machines but with "living thoughts," and the shards—like the one he wore—that connected worlds by bending the laws of time.
But those were fairy tales told in slums and rebel hideouts.
He activated the descent thrusters. "Time to see how deep the lies go