—[PLANETARY FILE: Elaris]—
Planet Name: Elaris
Star System: The Helion Verge
System Classification: Disputed Zone – Strategic Resource-rich Lagrange Cluster
Technological Tier: Pre-industrial (Wired communications, flintlock weaponry, basic metallurgy, steam development potential)
Continents:
Norvalis – Cragged north, forested highlands, feudal dominions
Selvion – Southern continent with sprawling plains and river-fed kingdoms
Estimated Population: 320 million (planetwide)
Sentience Status: Non-aware (No known Interstellar contact initiated)
Status: Currently Contested – Union Naval Forces and Imperial Expansion Fleets en route for diplomatic mediation.
Warning: Escalation Probability — HIGH.
Notes: First known conflict site in the Helion Verge system between U.F.U(United Federation Union)-F.C.Z(Frontier-Controlled Zone) and S.O.E(Sovereign Order Empire)-O.T.Z(Outer-Territory Zone).
The morning mist curled like gentle smoke around the granite shoulders of Mount Harrin, trailing through the narrow crags and falling into the wide green valley below. The sun was still low, brushing golden light against the thatched rooftops of Harthvale, the mountain town carved into the cliffs like a series of shelves stacked above the sky. It was quiet except for the distant whirring of pulleys, and the occasional creak of a wooden cart descending down the valley path. The scent of damp stone, pine resin, and kiln ash filled the cool air.
Inside a modest pottery workshop built into the cliff wall, Arik Solen, fifteen years old, leaned over his wheel. His hands, caked in soft grey clay, guided a spinning lump into the thin, rising shape of a vase. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and dried streaks of old glaze ran down his apron. A battery-powered hand radio, a prized tool nearly twenty years old, crackled beside him. Soft static broke between faint melodies of viols and a deep baritone announcing the morning news.
"...and this year's harvest taxes will be levied on the tenth moon, as decreed by the council of Velthara's House of Lords," the voice said. "In other news, a minor tremor was felt near the southern hills of the Vaelwood province, no damage reported..."
"Steady, keep your left hand closer," said a gruff voice behind him.
Arik glanced up at his uncle Doren, a thick-shouldered man in his forties with a coal-dust beard and eyes like riverstone. He was organizing a row of fired vases onto a rack by the kiln.
Arik adjusted, pressing his palm lightly as the vase took a more elegant curve. "I felt that tremor last night. Thought it was the wind."
"Wasn't the wind," Doren muttered, his voice carrying that practiced skepticism of craftsmen. "This mountain's been stable for five hundred years. Must've been something deeper."
"Deeper?" Arik asked, raising an eyebrow.
Doren didn't answer. Instead, he opened the iron door of the kiln. A hot breath escaped, bathing the workshop in a wave of heat and orange light.
Outside, the view from the workshop window was breathtaking. The Kingdom of Velthara, sprawled across the South Horizon Valley, glittered in the distance. Fields of grain swayed in the light, dotted by steeples, long brick aqueducts, and the far white spires of the capital keep. Riders moved like insects along the merchant roads. From here, it all looked like a painting. Peaceful, still, and untouched.
Arik's gaze shifted upward toward the open sky. Five bright stars sat above the valley unnaturally bright, unmoving. They'd been there for months. He could track them from dawn to dusk.
Everyone in Harthvale had noticed, of course, but over time they had been accepted like a new constellation. The stars didn't twinkle, didn't shift, and didn't fade.
"You think they'll stay up there forever?" Arik asked.
Doren looked out over the ledge but didn't answer at first. "Stars move, Arik. Always do. Maybe not now, maybe not next moon. But they'll move when they need to."
He turned and went back to work. Arik stared at them a bit longer. The five lights hung silently in the pale blue sky like waiting eyes.
The radio shifted again, crackling with a burst of static. Arik flinched and leaned toward it, adjusting the tuner slightly.
"--rren seventy-three—coordina--"
Another sharp crackle. Then silence.
"Hmmm how odd," he muttered.
Doren didn't notice. The older man was hauling sacks of ash-glazed clay toward the wheel, grumbling to himself. Arik wiped his hands on a rag and leaned closer to the radio again.
"Could be the tower again," he said, turning the dial slightly. "Keeps dropping in and out."
"You've been listening to that thing too much," Doren said, setting down a jug. "If you focused more on hands than voices, your lines would stay straight."
"I like the voices," Arik replied with a faint smile.
"Makes me feel like I'm not the only one up here talking to the wind."
Doren barked a low laugh. "You're never alone up here, boy. You've got me, the kiln, and a thousand pots that need selling."
A bell rang in the town square three chimes. The sound echoed up the stone paths like a shepherd's call.
"Deliveries are coming in," Doren said. "Go on, get some fresh air. We need more salt glaze and some cord. And stop by the Smith's shop. See if he finally sharpened those wire cutters."
Arik washed his hands quickly, tied back his hair, and took the leather satchel from the peg near the door. Outside, the wind carried the scent of pine and drying grain. He descended the carved stairways through the town's terraces, greeting familiar faces as he passed.
"Morning, Arik!" called Mira, the baker's daughter, handing out honey buns at a stall.
"Morning," he replied, catching the bun she tossed him.
The town of Harthvale was alive with quiet motion. Children chased goats between steps, old men played bone dice on stone benches, and crafters shouted prices in the tiny plaza where fresh supplies were carted in from the valley below. There was a sense of rhythm to it all. A timelessness. Like the whole town had been repeating the same breath for generations.
At the far end of the square, Arik noticed Old Harven, the tower keeper, fiddling with a tangle of wire on a cracked copper antenna mounted atop a pole across the radio relay station. The man's thick goggles were pushed onto his forehead, his hands black with oil.
"Harven!" Arik called out. "You breaking the signal again?"
"Wasn't me, lad," the old man said, not looking down. "Sky's acting up. Interference from somewhere farther than our towers ever talk to."
"What do you mean, farther?"
But Harven just muttered something unintelligible and went back to his work.
Arik turned back toward the supply stalls. As he moved, he looked once more up to the sky. The five unmoving stars glinted in the daylight, a pale reminder of something that didn't belong. He remembered what his uncle said that stars always move.
But these… didn't.
And something deep in his chest whispered that one day, they would.
That night, as the valley fell under a blue-purple dusk, Arik stood on the balcony outside his small stone room, watching the sky again. The wind had picked up since the afternoon, pushing low clouds across the peaks, but the five stars bright, white, unwavering shone clearly through.
He'd brought a thick blanket and a chunk of dry slate. With a piece of sharpened bone charcoal, he began sketching the lights above. Not just dots he connected them, noting their position relative to Harrin's peak, the distant river bend, and the large star known to the locals as "The Lantern." He'd been charting them for weeks now, and they hadn't shifted an inch.
"Still there?" came Doren's voice from inside.
"Still there," Arik said without turning. "They never move."
"They're stars. They're not meant to dance for you."
"They're not stars."
Doren grunted.
Arik drew a thin triangle beside one of the lights. He didn't know why. It just looked right. The more he stared, the more it felt like the lights weren't natural not like the constellations he used to map as a boy. These five held formation. Too deliberate. Too clean. Like nails hammered into the sky.
Below, the town was already settling in. Chimneys puffed faint trails of smoke, dogs barked once or twice before settling into the night, and the occasional wagon wheel creaked down the main road. Velthara's lights, visible even from this height, shimmered like lanterns floating above the plain.
He turned the dial on the radio slowly, letting the frequencies pass by like ghosts. Music, static, silence, a brief burst of folk storytelling then static again. He stopped on one channel where a soft female voice was reading poetry.
"...and like the breath of giants in slumber, the skies waited, silent, patient, holding secrets yet to fall…"
Then a loud snap of static.
"---initiate realignment on Vector Grid--hold, hold—patch reinforcement—standby--"
Another burst. Then silence.
Arik's breath caught in his throat.
He adjusted the tuner again too fast and the signal slipped away. He froze for a second, fingers hovering above the brass dial. The language hadn't sounded like Velthari, or even any dialect from the south. It was clipped, harsh, full of compound syllables and cadence like a command chant.
"Who's up there?" he whispered to no one.
He looked back at the stars unchanged. And yet, something about them felt different.
The next morning, he brought his sketch to the workshop and set it on the workbench beside the drying vases. Doren looked at it over his shoulder, squinting.
"You spending your nights drawing fairy lights again?" he asked.
Arik shrugged. "Just… trying to figure them out."
"You figure out how to center your handles first, then maybe the heavens will wait."
That earned a small laugh from Arik. But he couldn't help glancing out the workshop's tall open window between shaping tasks, watching the daylight bend around those same five pinpoints.
By midday, the sun was high, and the heat in the workshop thickened to a stifling blanket. Doren had gone to the nearby quarry to negotiate for more firewood, leaving Arik alone with the wheel, the radio, and the open window that framed the kingdom far below.
He was working on a wide ceramic basin when he heard the voice again.
Static. Then:
"--diplomatic status compromised—no response from station—advise withdrawal—three minutes to jump—"
The voice was followed by a short burst of interference, then faint music again. This time, a low, almost mournful flute solo.
Arik dropped the shaping tool. It clattered against the floor, echoing in the quiet room.
He stepped over to the radio and sat still, ears straining.
Silence.
Then a soft pop.
And everything went quiet.
He sat like that for nearly an hour, not working, barely breathing, afraid even to change the dial again.
That night, the sky was clear. The moon had not yet risen. The stars above seemed unusually sharp.
And then he saw it.
Three new lights, fainter than the five, but distinctly shaped and aligned in a curve, appeared briefly on the northern edge of the sky hovering, motionless, and unlike anything he'd seen.
They blinked once, then slowly dimmed.
And by dawn, they were gone.
He didn't mention them to Doren.
The next few days passed slowly. Town life resumed its patterns supply caravans arriving from the capital, priests preaching against the price of salt, and a traveling puppet show entertaining children in the square. But Arik remained distracted.
He found himself looking up more often, and not just at night. Sometimes during the day he'd see tiny flickers of light far too high for birds, and far too still for clouds. The five unmoving stars remained as they were, but now… other, dimmer lights came and went.
One afternoon, while shopping for glaze powder, he overheard a trader from the south speaking near a supply cart.
"I tell you, something's happening near the cliffs of Ulban," the man said. "Farmers say fire fell from the sky last week. Left a crater big as the old well."
"Bah, probably a rockslide," his companion muttered.
"Rocks don't melt iron."
Arik lingered a little longer than he should have, then hurried back to the workshop with a bundle of glaze powder under one arm, his thoughts racing.
That night, as the wind rose and clouds drifted across the mountain pass, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
He no longer felt like the stars were distant. They were watching. Waiting. And whatever had arrived those three faint lights hadn't simply vanished.
They had left. And he had no idea why.
The next two mornings passed with an unusual stillness. The wind seemed to carry no birdsong, and the bells in the town square rang softer somehow, more tentative as if the mountain itself was listening to something. The townsfolk didn't talk about it, but Arik could feel it in their glances, in the quiet that lingered after casual conversations. Something had changed.
He had barely spoken to Doren since the night of the three lights. Not out of fear, but because the older man seemed on edge, more focused. He moved with restless purpose around the workshop, adjusting firing times, remeasuring glaze weights, and cleaning tools that didn't need cleaning.
That morning, as Arik kneaded clay near the back window, the radio cracked to life again.
This time, there was no static. Just silence. Then a low hum. Then:
"...Unit 4-N requesting acknowledgment from central relay, grid delta-seven-nine, no response received... repeat, no atmospheric resistance noted, maintain vector..."
The voice was calm, but clinical. Sharp syllables, no breath between words.
Then a second voice, deeper and faster:
"...Warning system disruption, SOE strike craft in grid three-two confirmed, fallback to safe orbit. All diplomatic craft disengaging..."
A second later, the signal was gone.
Arik's mouth went dry.
He looked out the window.
The five unmoving stars were still there.
He dropped the clay and ran to the small cabinet where he kept his journal. Flipping through the pages, he found the column where he'd begun writing down bits of the transmissions. Now the fragmented phrases formed a chilling rhythm:
...fallback to safe orbit...
...no response received...
...SOE strike craft...
...grid delta-seven-nine...
He didn't know what they meant, but he understood the tone. Whoever was speaking wasn't reporting to a town, or a kingdom, or a council. They were reporting to something larger something greater from above.
When Doren returned that evening, Arik almost told him. But the words wouldn't come. He saw the older man's face creased and tired, his eyes unfocused, as if weighed by something he couldn't name. He simply gave Arik a pat on the shoulder and said, "Market day in Velthara's coming. Let's finish these urns."
Arik nodded, but his mind wasn't in the clay anymore.
That night, the stars blinked again. Not all five but two of them dimmed for the briefest moment, then pulsed softly. Not random. Not accidental. Like a signal.
By midday the next day, half the town had gathered at the square.
A shepherd had returned from the high western ridge with what he claimed was a piece of the sky.
"It fell like fire!" the man shouted, his face flushed, eyes wide. "Came down with a hiss, like boiling wind! Landed near the old saltstone!"
He held up a twisted piece of blackened metal, sharp and ridged. It shimmered faintly, catching the sunlight strangely, as if it absorbed more light than it reflected.
Arik pushed through the crowd and got a closer look.
The shard was like nothing he'd ever seen jagged edges, layered like overlapping scales, with small hexagonal ridges running along one side. A faint, sour ozone smell rose from it.
"It's not from here," said someone behind him.
"Maybe from the gods," murmured an old woman.
A boy beside Arik reached to touch it, but the shepherd pulled it back.
"Burns cold," he warned. "Like frostbite, even in sunlight."
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Arik turned and left, walking quickly back up toward the north end of town toward the relay station.
The tower stood alone, its antenna spires like metal thorns against the sky. The structure was small—only two rooms and a stairwell, its copper roof turned green by time but it buzzed faintly with an energy none of the town's other buildings shared. It had been built fifty years ago by travelers from the capital who spoke of "wave relays" and "cross-kingdom communications." Few knew how it worked. Fewer still cared except Old Harven.
The door creaked open under Arik's hand. The station smelled of warm dust, old iron, and something sharper ozone, maybe, like the shard.
Harven was bent over a worktable, his back turned, fiddling with coils of wire and metal sheets.
"You're back," he said, without looking.
Arik hesitated. "The signal. I heard it again."
Harven didn't speak.
"I wrote it down," Arik continued, pulling out his journal. "There were two voices. Talking about… orbits. Strike craft. And something called SOE."
That got Harven's attention. The old man turned, his oil-streaked goggles sliding down his nose. "You wrote it down?"
Arik handed over the journal page. Harven read in silence. His jaw tightened.
"I knew it," the old man muttered. "Something's going on. Something big."
"You know what this is?"
Harven walked to the far side of the room and unlocked a metal cabinet Arik had never seen opened. Inside were stacks of strange papers, old metal disks, and a long object wrapped in faded blue cloth. He pulled out a brittle book labeled RELAY PROTOCOLS – OUTER TRANSLINK and flipped it open.
"These signals…" he said, "they're not from any relay tower on Elaris."
"Elaris?"
Harven stopped and looked at Arik for the first time in full. "That's the real name of this world, lad. Not just 'the kingdom' or 'the valley.' Elaris. Been hearing that name for years now, in bursts, snippets. Not in our tongue, mind you other voices, ones that speak like thunder."
Arik stared.
"You're saying there's... people above the sky? Beyond it?"
Harven chuckled grimly. "Oh, there's more than just people. There's fleets. Empires. Things that eat moons and control the stars."
Arik's hands trembled slightly. "But… why would they be here?"
"Same reason anyone comes anywhere," Harven said, looking out the station's high window toward the five lights in the sky. "Because someone else wants it."
Back at the workshop, Arik sat in silence long after night fell. Doren was asleep. The kiln fire had gone dim. Only the radio remained lit, a faint blue glow humming beneath its dials.
He turned it slowly, hand barely moving.
Static. Music. Silence.
Then, like a breath from nowhere:
"Union command to all fleet arms cease approach to SOE marker stations. Diplomatic threshold broken. Code trigger received. Prepare realignment sequence. Planetary front staging confirmed."
Then silence again.
Arik leaned back, staring at the five stars now burning brighter than ever.
Something was coming. He could feel it.
The first one fell at dawn.
A sound like air splitting down the spine of the sky jolted Arik from sleep. He stumbled out of bed and ran to the balcony, the cold morning biting at his bare arms. In the pale blue sky, a trail of smoke lingered long and curling, like the tail of a dragon dragged across the heavens. It drifted westward toward the hills beyond the town.
A few minutes later, the sound reached them: a deep, distant thump, low and trembling.
Doren emerged moments later, tightening his belt and wiping sleep from his eyes. "What in the gods' name was that?"
Arik pointed to the sky, where the trail was already fading. "Something fell. From up there."
Doren looked toward the horizon for a long time, jaw set. He didn't reply.
By noon, two more came down this time during daylight. They weren't stars or meteors. Their descent was slow, controlled, as if they'd been pushed or guided. Each burned a different color one red, the other orange-blue and left behind black streaks in the cloudless sky.
The townsfolk gathered at the overlook terrace, staring in stunned silence.
"Is it a comet storm?" Mira asked aloud.
"No storm I ever saw," muttered her father, arms crossed.
Old Harven didn't come down from the relay tower that day.
Later that evening, when the stars returned, Arik could see the sky had changed again. The five bright points that had remained so still were now...flickering. Not steadily, like candlelight but in irregular pulses. And further east, three more faint points of light had joined them. Unlike before, these weren't still they moved, gliding in sharp angles and short bursts like sharks under water.
The radio crackled with static most of the night. Then, faintly:
"Void station 3 is lost. Debris falling toward southern vector. Abandon anchor point. Begin orbital counterfire."
Then silence.
The next morning, a farmer came into Harthvale dragging a cart with something wrapped in burlap.
"Landed near my field," he said. "Buried half in the dirt. Broke two trees."
He pulled the cloth aside. Beneath it was a jagged hunk of silvery-black alloy, scorched at one end, still steaming faintly in the cold. Strange geometric markings etched the surface lines that curved around a central point, but led nowhere. Arik crouched near it and reached out before pulling his hand back.
"It's humming," he whispered.
Indeed, if one leaned close enough, the object emitted a soft vibration. Not a sound, exactly, but a sensation that buzzed in the teeth.
"It's not stone," someone said.
"Or iron."
"Then what is it?"
No one had an answer.
Harven emerged from the relay tower that afternoon. He looked worn and pale, his gait stiff.
"There'll be more," he told Arik quietly. "Whatever's above us… they're tearing each other apart."
Arik followed him up the tower steps for the first time in days. Inside, the air was thicker static hung in the air like a scent. The relay console hummed louder than usual, and Harven had a new sheet of paper covered in handwritten translations.
"They're fighting?" Arik asked, voice quiet.
Harven nodded. "The Union, the Empire. I don't know their full names, but I've picked up enough over the years to know they're not from here. Not from this world."
He paused, then pointed to the five stars visible through the high tower window.
"Those aren't stars. They're stations. Big ones. Like cities that float."
Arik felt like the floor shifted beneath him. "And the debris?"
"Ships. Weapons. Things that don't belong in our sky."
That night, the sky came alive with color.
Streaks of violet, orange, and silver rained down in arcs over the valley. Some curved in slow spirals, while others burst like fireworks upon descent, scattering pieces across the horizon. The townspeople stopped everything dinners abandoned, prayers paused as they watched the heavens burn.
Arik stood atop the kiln roof, heart hammering, eyes locked on the display.
Then came the thunder.
Not just one blast, but many. Deep, rolling, miles away but enough to rattle windows and scatter birds. The mountains absorbed most of it, but each wave of sound still reached them, as if the earth itself was listening.
"Something's burning," Doren said from beside him.
"Where?" Arik asked.
Doren pointed beyond the southern hills, past the furthest reach of the Veltharan plains. In the distance, a pillar of black smoke was rising, lit faintly from beneath by dull orange flickers.
"No kingdom sets that kind of fire," he said grimly.
Over the next few days, the sky didn't stop.
Each morning, more trails long, spiraling, broken. Each night, flashes on the horizon. Some impacts were distant, their sounds barely making it across the valley. Others shook the stone terraces and sent goats scrambling.
And then, one landed close.
On the third night of the meteor rains, a bright blue streak screamed across the northern range and slammed into the forest just west of Harthvale. The impact lit the treetops with a sickly green flash. Birds scattered. Windows cracked.
The following morning, Arik joined a group of townspeople heading toward the crash site. They moved in silence, axes and water skins on their backs, unsure if they were marching toward treasure, death or something in between.
The object had plowed through a clearing, leaving a trench of upturned stone and scorched moss. At the end of it, half-buried in a slope, lay what looked like a broken shard of architecture half a dome of black, angular plates, with faint blue lights still pulsing deep within the seams.
Someone reached forward, touching the side of it with the tip of a spear. The object hissed faintly. Then stilled.
"What is it?" someone asked.
"A weapon," said another.
"No," Arik whispered. "It's... a piece of something bigger."
That night, he sat with his journal, sketching the fragments. His fingers trembled. The quiet he'd known all his life the rhythm of clay, fire, and valley winds was being swallowed.
Something was coming down. And it wasn't stopping.
Three days after the nearest impact, Arik stood at the edge of the mountain road with a canvas pack slung over his shoulder, waiting for the merchant caravan to finish loading their crates of ceramics. The morning light cast long gold beams over the stone path as two oxen shifted restlessly in their yokes. Doren stood beside him, arms crossed, eyes on the horizon.
"You don't have to go," the older man said, his voice low.
"I want to see it," Arik replied. "What's really happening."
Doren studied him a moment, then grunted. "If the capital's fallen, the king's not going to care how straight your urns are."
"I'm not bringing urns," Arik said. "Just eyes."
The caravan moved at a steady pace down the winding road into the lower slopes. Birds circled lazily overhead, but the air felt thinner somehow quiet in a way Arik hadn't known before. He walked alongside a cart driven by Master Corven, a leather-jacketed trader who had been delivering goods from Harthvale to Velthara for years.
"You're not just here for the ride, are you?" Corven asked as they passed a ridge of bent pine trees. "You've seen what's up there. In the sky."
Arik hesitated. "Only what I can understand."
"That's more than most."
Below them, the plains of Velthara stretched wide and green. But even from a distance, Arik could see it was no longer peaceful. Columns of smoke dotted the landscape like broken candle wicks. And far beyond, in the direction of the southern kingdoms, he could just make out the faint silhouettes of massive triangular shapes, low in the sky and eerily still ships, not clouds. Machines, not myths.
It took half a day to reach the lower trade roads, but even before they arrived at the outer district of Velthara, the changes were undeniable. The wide avenue into the capital was packed not with wagons of goods, but lines of weary people. Refugees, most from the southern provinces. Some carried bundles and packs. Others, only the clothes on their backs.
A woman sat by the roadside, her arms wrapped around two sleeping children. Beside her, an elderly man muttered prayers into a cracked wooden idol.
Corven slowed the cart, calling out, "Where are you from?"
"Thalaron Keep," the man replied hoarsely. "Gone. Burned. They came from the sky machines and men in red and black armor. They didn't speak our tongue. They didn't wait for surrender."
A chill passed through Arik.
"Did they fight?" Corven asked.
"Not long," the man said. "Some kingdoms bent the knee. Others resisted. They're gone now."
As the caravan passed deeper into the outer district, signs of chaos grew. Smoke wafted over rooftops. Temple bells rang not for prayer, but for alarms. Horses bolted in fear at strange tremors in the ground. And overhead, those immense triangular ships like floating mountain peaks turned upside-down drifted in the far-off skies, barely visible except when their hulls glinted against the sun.
At the capital's market square, Arik saw a wall of canvas tents hastily raised for refugees. Soldiers in bronze cuirasses were organizing lines of civilians, handing out water. But even the soldiers looked disoriented. They kept glancing up at the sky.
Inside the trade hall, murmurs turned to urgent whispers.
"They landed in Ravaryn walked through the palace gates like they owned it. Crimson and black armor, helmets shaped like smooth limestone."
"My cousin says they burned a library for refusing to hand over scrolls."
"Kingdoms falling one by one. No warning. No war declared. Just fire and steel from above."
Corven pulled Arik aside. "You've seen it coming," he said. "You and the old man in the relay tower. You knew."
"I didn't know this," Arik said, voice low. "I didn't think it would be this fast."
That afternoon, Arik walked to the edge of the merchant quarter, where the walls opened onto the southern plains. There, for the first time, he saw the invasion with his own eyes.
Across the far horizon, in the direction of the Kingdoms of Halvarra and Drosin, dozens of triangular voidships drifted above the grasslands like dark sails. From their bellies, small silver dots pods or transports descended in measured rhythm. Like snowflakes of iron. Like seeds of war.
He couldn't hear them, not from this distance, but he didn't need to.
Columns of fire and smoke rose along the edge of the visible land. Entire hamlets and forts burned in silence from where he stood.
And worse: Arik could just make out figures marching in formation lines of motionless, crimson-armored beings with weapons that shimmered unnaturally under the sun. The Imperial Ground Forces.
They advanced without horses. Without banners. Without sound.
Behind them, more civilians fled carts full, animals panicked, soldiers wounded and dragging swords. And the voidships above? They simply hovered, like judges watching from a distant height.
By the time Arik returned to the caravan, Corven had begun packing crates again. "We're not staying," he said. "We'll take whoever we can and go back to Harthvale."
Arik nodded silently.
The return journey was slower. The roads were choked with people. Some wept openly. Others carried stories that chilled the bone.
"They don't speak," one said of the armored invaders. "They just gesture. And burn what they want."
"Whole keeps vanished," another whispered. "Not torn down gone, like the wind took them."
And then came a report from a panicked trader: the Kingdom of Rhenmar, one of Velthara's southern neighbors, had surrendered after its keep was leveled by a beam of light from the sky.
It wasn't just conquest. It was demonstration.
When Arik reached Harthvale once more, the town was different.
More refugees had arrived dozens, maybe hundreds. The square had become a shelter, the bakery a soup station. Doren met Arik at the top of the stairs, his eyes sunken but relieved.
"You saw it," he said.
Arik just nodded.
That night, as the sun set, he returned to the balcony with his journal.
The five bright "stars" were still there but now, they pulsed erratically.
And below them, nearer the planet, were new shapes. Not small glimmers giant silhouettes, descending slowly, triangular and immense, dark against the burning skies.
The invasion had begun.
And Elaris was no longer just a world. It was a warfront.
The first explosion came just past midday in the few days.
Arik was in the Veltharan market square, standing near a cloth merchant's stall with Doren, bartering for lengths of binding rope. The square was loud with voices refugees, soldiers, merchants trying to stay relevant through a fraying society. Then, like a blade slicing through cloth, a sharp, high-pitched crack split the air.
Everyone froze.
A few seconds later, a rolling thunder deep and alien reverberated across the entire city. The ground trembled underfoot, enough to sway the tents and rattle windows. Faint screams echoed from the higher terraces. Arik looked up, heart suddenly pounding.
Over the southern horizon, beyond the stretch of farmland and into the empire-held territories, a great red-orange bloom of light erupted upward. It was far, maybe hundreds of miles but still visible. A moment later, a second column of smoke rose, then a third.
People began rushing toward the outer walls of the city. Arik followed, weaving through the crowd until he reached a spot with an unobstructed view of the plains.
The horizon had changed.
Where once there had been forests and rivers, there were now pillars of fire and smoke, some rising miles into the air. Bright flashes continued to ripple far beyond, as if a great hand were crushing light into the land itself. The sound kept coming in waves, as if time were broken.
"It's happening," someone whispered beside him. "The sky is falling."
A mother clutched her daughter tightly. Soldiers stared in silence. Even the refugee children, once loud with questions and complaints, said nothing.
Arik turned his eyes upward.
Above the city, the five bright lights the orbital stations still flickered. But now there were smaller shapes moving around them. Voidships. At least a dozen, locked in strange patterns that pulsed and twisted like a dance of metal giants. Even from the surface, their movement seemed tense angled and deliberate.
Then came another light white, searing, unnatural.
It bloomed in the far southeast. Brighter than the sun for a moment. And after the flash, a new shape emerged on the horizon a massive wall of dust and debris that grew taller by the second. Unlike the earlier explosions, this one had a shape. A column with a wide, curling top.
A mushroom cloud.
Arik's knees weakened.
"What... what was that?" he asked aloud.
An old soldier standing near him replied in a hoarse whisper. "I dont know lad... i dont know..."
The Union, it seemed, had changed its tactics.
Where once precision strikes had marked the first days of the conflict, now the orbital fleet had begun deploying nuclear warheads to break the Empire's grip on the southern territories. Arik didn't know the words yet, but he understood the weight of what he was seeing.
And he knew: the land would not forget this.
That night, Harthvale was blanketed in silence. Even the refugees were too stunned to speak.
From the highest terrace, Arik watched the horizon burn. Each flash in the distance was a message, not to them but to someone else watching.
The Union wanted the world to see what it could do.
And the Empire, somewhere out there, would surely answer.
Above it all, the voidships circled like vultures over dying kingdoms. The sky no longer belonged to dreams or stars.
It belonged to war.
It began as a glint in one morning.
A single flicker of movement high in the noon sky, far above the clouds where no bird could soar. Arik was gathering clay from the riverside valley, helping a group of displaced craftsmen resettle their small wheel stations outside the town. He'd spent the morning in silence haunted by the night before listening only to the wind.
Then came that glint. Then a shimmer.
And then, with growing clarity, a shape—huge, angular, burning.
"Look there!" someone shouted, pointing upward.
All heads turned.
From the highest cloudbank above the southern horizon, a colossal mass broke through the atmosphere, trailing a wide stream of flame. It moved slowly at first, like a falling colossus fighting gravity. Its metallic skin had once gleamed silver-blue, but now it was scorched, smoking, torn open like a wounded animal. Even from a great distance, it was clear: this was no star, no meteor. It was a voidship, and it was dying.
The angle of descent bent its fall eastward. Smaller parts peeled away hull fragments, entire side plating, towers, antennae. Pieces broke off and burned long before the vessel reached lower clouds.
Then came the sound a howl, deep and shrieking, that rolled through the entire valley like a wounded beast. Animals bolted. People screamed and ducked for cover. Arik felt it in his ribs.
The ship vanished into the far forested foothills beyond Harthvale, its final descent trailing a fiery arc across the sky like the world's longest comet. Then impact.
A muted flash. A dull shockwave. No sound for five seconds, and then the earth roared. Trees cracked. Birds fled. Windows shattered in the town behind them. And from beyond the trees, a great gray column of fire and soil erupted upward, blotting out the sun in one section of the sky.
The crash had scarred the land.
Another voidship one of the Empire's heavy frigates, some said had been struck in orbit and failed to maintain course. Now it lay in ruin.
"Gods preserve us," whispered one of the elders kneeling in the riverbed. "The heavens are bleeding."
That day, the skies were not done.
By late afternoon, two more massive forms descended, both aflame. One vanished beyond the northern ridgeline, likely in Imperial-occupied land. The other broke apart midair its pieces streaking in multiple directions, a wide swath of destruction drawn across the sky.
Arik and Doren stood outside their home, along with half the village, staring upward.
"You see that one?" Doren said grimly. "That wasn't just shot down. That was torn apart."
"You think the one attacking is losing?" Arik asked.
"No," Doren said. "I think they're willing to lose ships if it means taking the others grip with them."
As twilight came, the horizon no longer resembled a place of peace. Five distinct plumes of black smoke marked major impact sites. The glow of fires danced in distant clouds. Refugee waves became floods, people arriving in Harthvale with soot on their faces and metal fragments in their arms.
Some brought stories.
"I saw one of the ships crash into the capital of Drosin," a hunter said. "It hit like a falling mountain. The palace is gone. All of it."
"They tried to shoot back," a woman added. "The Empire's forces red-armored things they tried to hold the ground. But their weapons… they didn't work against fire from space."
As the evening cooled, more debris fell a shattered engine core, half a fuselage, melted alloy chunks the size of carts.
The mayor of Harthvale ordered guards to watch the skies overnight, not to raise alarm but to simply understand what was happening. The town had no army. No fortifications. Just observation.
Arik sat by the kiln yard late into the night, the sky above no longer full of stars but flickers bright, dying lights, voidships passing like embers blown across a black sea.
And then came the final vision of the day.
A massive shadow loomed above the town, dim at first, moving in utter silence.
It wasn't falling. It was gliding.
A Union voidship a destroyer-class, larger than anything Arik had imagined cut across the sky just above the valley. Its hull was dark gray, the underbelly marked with blue and silver lights. No engines screamed. No weapons fired.
But its presence cast a shadow over Harthvale so deep and cold that it seemed to pull the warmth from the earth.
People screamed. Others fell to their knees.
Children cried and clung to their parents.
Arik stared upward, heart hammering. The ship passed so close he could make out docking bays, gun ports, rotating sensor spires. It drifted with terrifying calm an object made for space, but now haunting the surface.
It moved on toward Velthara.
And behind it, three smaller ships frigates followed like wolves to a leader.
As the shadow passed and the stars returned, Arik sat alone beneath the crumbling town bell. In the distance, beyond the mountain ridge, he could see it again
A flash.
Then another.
Then... a twin flash, bright and blinding.
He stood. Others nearby saw it too. A murmur spread.
And then they saw it a pair of mushroom clouds, rising slowly into the clouds beyond the horizon.
The Union had deployed another wave of nuclear warheads this time on the bordering kingdoms, where the Empire still had grip.
The townspeople could do nothing but watch. The sky was no longer a mystery. It was a god, and that god had brought wrath and ruin.
The border kingdoms fell in less than three days. The first was Velron, a once-proud mountain realm with silver-veined cliffs and fortress keeps built atop stone arches. Arik had seen its banners from the edge of his uncle's valley overlook, vibrant reds and golds glinting even at distance. Now, all that remained was smoke. The Union had turned their orbital arrays toward it once the Empire's crimson-armored ground divisions dug in around the high passes.
No one knew exactly what was used. The first explosion wasn't a flash it was a glow, steady and white, blooming from beneath the range like molten roots spreading from the earth's heart. Then came the dust. Then fire. And then... silence.
Survivors said nothing was left no walls, no crests, no stones.
In the following nights, triangular voidships descended again scores of them. Not with thunderous entrances, but silent glides that pierced through clouds like blades. They cast shadows across multiple provinces at once. Villages that hadn't seen a war in a century now found themselves under occupation, not by men, but by metal beasts and soldiers in armor black as coal and trimmed with crimson light.
The Empire's Ground Forces, once described in wild tales as monsters from hell, were now reality. Their boots were heavy. Their formations too perfect. Their speech, when heard through captured radios, was cold, sharp, and coded.
Refugees poured into Harthvale. Every morning, new faces. Dirty, injured, wide-eyed. Children without parents. Nobles without guards. Priests who had lost their temples.
"Is it true?" someone whispered near the forge.
"That the Grand Cathedral of Menessa collapsed from the attack?"
"Not collapsed," someone answered. "It sank. The ground liquefied. The spires fell in."
Arik watched it all helpless, furious, confused.
He no longer listened to the radio for music. He listened for coordinates, trying to understand where was next.
On the fifth day after Velron's fall, Arik decided to visit the relay station again.
The tower was high on the northern ridge, above the old mill trail, and surrounded by fences of coiled metal that buzzed faintly. It wasn't guarded not heavily. People respected it. Feared it, even.
Inside, he found the operator again the same man with the tired eyes, worn coat, and voice that always sounded like it was borrowed from some older age.
"I was wondering when you'd come," the operator said, not turning from the large curved window that looked over the valley. The light in the sky was orange with smoke. Five new trails of dust cut into the western horizon crash sites, maybe more voidships lost in battle.
"I needed to know if anything's left," Arik said quietly.
The operator didn't answer right away.
Then, he pointed out the window toward the eastern spires. "See that shape near the hill? That's a transport freighter Union design. Crashed two hours ago. Sensors picked up a local pulse when it hit."
"I thought they won," Arik said, confused. "The Union. They're pushing the Empire back, aren't they?"
"They are. But that doesn't mean the war is over. Not here. Not above. The skies are bleeding in night and day."
Arik stepped closer to the window. "Why are they even here? Why this world?"
The operator sighed. "Because this world sits on a border. And to them, borders are like lines on a chessboard irrelevant unless contested."
Outside, the land flickered again another blast, farther this time. But still bright. Still loud.
"I keep listening," the operator said. "Day and night. To their frequencies. I've learned a few things. What you see here... it's a fraction. A single spark in a war the size of stars."
"So it's hopeless," Arik muttered.
"No." The operator turned to him. "But it means we're not the center of the universe, boy. We're... collateral."
A long silence passed between them.
Then the operator said, almost softly, "You still make pottery?"
Arik blinked, surprised. "Yes. I mean less now. But I try."
"Keep trying. Someone will need to remember what we were. Before we became a warzone."
As Arik left the station, the wind pulled at his coat, carrying the distant scent of ash and salt. The sun was beginning to set behind a thick veil of clouds and drifting debris.
Below him, he saw three wrecked voidships smoldering in separate valleys. One was still aflame. The other lay like a fallen temple, half-buried in earth. The third was being picked apart by distant figures locals, no doubt. Scavengers.
Somewhere out in those lands, kingdoms were dying without names, cities erased from records not by time but by fire.
And yet, here in Harthvale, the kiln still stood. The workshop still had clay. The wheel still turned.
Maybe, Arik thought, that was reason enough to keep going.
The days following the last great crashes were quiet.
Too quiet.
No more fireballs in the sky. No flashes on the horizon. No glowing stars that pulsed like silent sentinels. The screaming voidships had stopped coming. The mushroom clouds no longer bloomed. There were no more distant thunderclaps that rattled windows and made dogs hide under porches.
Just a stilled world, as if the planet itself had exhaled long and deep and now waited to see what would come next.
The people of Harthvale didn't speak of peace. No one dared say the word aloud. They knew better. They had seen too much. But they moved more freely through the town again. Some shops reopened. The forge rang with slow hammer blows once more. The potter's wheel turned again in the yard.
Arik sat at the edge of his family's workshop, glazing a narrow vase. His hands were steady, but his thoughts drifted.
He kept hearing that word again in his mind: "collateral."
That's what they were. What this entire world was. Not a homeland. Not a civilization. Just a checkered square on a galactic board.
And yet, the world still turned. The soil still gave clay. The sky still bled its colors across dusk and dawn.
Doren had grown quiet too. He didn't speak much after the last wave of refugees came and went. He spent his days at the kiln, perfecting large ceremonial urns with intricate ridges and old glyphs. They weren't for sale, Arik realized. They were for memorial.
For things already gone.
"Any word from the relay?" Arik asked one morning.
"Nothing but static and scattered fragments," Doren replied, not looking up. "Sometimes a Union code ping. But no voices. Like the war's moved on without us."
Arik nodded, unsure whether to feel relieved or forgotten.
It was midmorning three days later when the clouds broke, and the world changed once more.
Arik had gone out to the upper ledge past the northern ridge, where the old orchard trees clung to the slope like stubborn old men. He liked sitting there when he wasn't throwing clay. From that angle, he could see the full arc of the horizon.
And today, what he saw froze him in place.
From the farthest reaches of the eastern sky, a colossal shape emerged not falling, not burning, but gliding, smooth and deliberate.
A carrier-class voidship.
Even at such height and distance, its structure dominated the atmosphere. Nearly a mile long, with two dorsal fins, with multiple small hangar bays across on each side, and wide rotating antenna structures that gleamed like steel wings, the ship cast a trail of shadow that reached the edges of entire provinces.
It wasn't alone.
Behind it, forming a V-shape across the sky, came dozens of ships frigates, cruisers, destroyers. The Union Navy, clean, orderly, and untouched by fire.
Arik stood in stunned silence as the fleet moved in formation, slowly enveloping the planet like a closing hand.
There were no sounds. No beams. No distant flashes. Just the low, steady rumble like the hum of inevitability.
People gathered again in the streets. Harthvale's square filled. Farmers, potters, children, tradesmen all looking skyward.
"It's over," someone whispered.
"Is that them?" asked a child.
"Yes," said the mayor, stepping forward from the church gate. "That's the winner. They've come to claim what's left."
Within the hour, radios across the town crackled again for the first time in days.
A signal, strong and purposeful. A male voice, speaking in calm, measured tone.
"To all surviving provincial communication centers of Designation Planet Elaris: This is Admiral Kalus Verrin of the United Federation Star Command.
As of 0900 standard, a final agreement has been enacted. Sovereign Order forces have withdrawn from all orbital and terrestrial positions.
The system is now under Union jurisdiction.
You are not to resist.
Aid convoys and data acquisition teams will begin deployment within forty-eight planetary hours.
Remain calm. Comply. Survive.
Hail to the Union."
The message repeated twice before fading.
No threats. No speeches of hope. Just order cold, distant, final.
That night, the stars returned.
But they were new stars. Stars that pulsed faintly with blue light, not the fire of fusion but the glow of power cores stationed in the stratosphere.
Above Harthvale, five small satellites now drifted in synchronous orbit. Quiet, perfect, and always watching.
People didn't celebrate. They slept lightly, if at all.
Arik returned to the kiln, looking up at the sky one last time. The stars he'd known his entire life had been replaced.
The war wasn't over.
But the world he knew was.
In the days followed the war never ended with parades or banners. No proclamations rang out in the valleys. No songs of victory echoed across mountaintops. Instead, there was a quiet kind of returning to life, to breath, to movement. First, the looters left. Then, the soldiers that remained began pulling twisted metal from the fields. Then, people started rebuilding walls. Doors. Roofs.
Harthvale had changed. But it had not died.
Arik and Doren worked again in the yard, not making urns anymore but bricks, tiles, and vessels to carry water to the broken hills below. The town well had been shattered by a shockwave weeks ago. The forge had suffered a partial collapse. But slowly, steadily, the old stone village found its rhythm again.
They patched homes. Cleared fallen trees. Smoothed cracked roads. And every morning, they gathered for short meetings, reading broadcasts from the Union's newly established Planetary Aid Relay.
"Harthvale Sector 17-B acknowledged. Civilian compliance level: Acceptable. Reconstruction materials en route. Union Officer Liaison to arrive in six days."
The Union didn't bring much celebration but they brought tools, and machines that could carry a house's worth of stone across valleys in minutes. Medical tents were raised. Scanners swept for radiation and toxicity. No one resisted. They knew better.
And above them, in the far horizon, the boy saw it: the former kingdom.
What once was a place of spires and ivy-wrapped keeps now rose in the form of angled alloys, dark metals, and angular buildings with glowing panels.
It was no longer a kingdom. It was now City V4.
Union designation. A "Forward Colonial Establishment Zone." Whatever that meant.
Arik watched it from the old orchard ridge every few days. Crews moved like ants. Gray banners flapped from sensor towers. Civilian modules expanded along the northern crest. Sometimes shuttles came and went dark gray, silent, and purposeful.
"Think they'll build a spaceport?" Doren asked one evening, sipping from a ceramic jug.
Arik shrugged. "Maybe. Think they'll let us leave someday?"
"Maybe. But I think they're more interested in what's in this world than where we go."
Arik didn't answer. The moon rose quietly above them.
Weeks passed. The orchard bloomed again scarred, but breathing. The relay tower blinked steadily from its ridge.
And one quiet night, as the town slept, Arik climbed to the roof of the workshop alone.
He sat there for a long time, knees drawn up, his coat wrapped tight around him.
Above, the sky was full of movement.
Not the chaos of war anymore but the order of fleets. Union voidships moved along orbital tracks like giant birds gliding on rails of starlight. Every few minutes, one would shimmer as it passed through the upper atmosphere, leaving behind a soft glow that slowly faded behind it.
He remembered the five "stars" from the beginning how they lingered overhead for months. Now, they were gone. In their place were navigation beacons, relays, and defense platforms. Quiet. Constant. Watching.
And still, the stars beyond those ships remained unchanged distant and ancient.
"Do you think they'll ever leave?" Arik whispered to the sky. "Or are we part of something forever now?"
The sky gave no answer.
Far above the world, beyond the cloudline and suspended over the upper atmosphere, the Union carrier-class voidship Vast Horizon floated in low orbit.
Inside its gleaming central hall, a crowd of soldiers, diplomats, and recording drones stood at attention.
At the head of the long steel table, Admiral Kalus Verrin of the United Federation Union watched silently as two diplomats approached each other one in Union gray and silver, the other in the black and crimson of the Sovereign Order Empire.
There were no smiles. No speeches.
Just a nod. A pen. A signature. And the quiet clatter of formalities exchanged.
One reporter whispered, "After two years of cold war and nine weeks of open conflict in the Theta Helion Corridor, it ends here."
Another replied, "On a backwater planet no one cared about until they did."
The Union diplomat turned to the Admiral. "The star system is now ours. But I fear this won't be the last dispute along the OTZ-FCZ border on this region."
Verrin's eyes didn't leave the planet outside the viewport.
"Perhaps," he murmured. "But for now. Let the world rests."
Back on the roof of the workshop, Arik leaned back, staring up at the stars as they shifted and crawled across the sky like the universe was still moving, even after everything it had taken.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a small piece of fired clay: a figure, barely finished, shaped like a man sitting under a moon.
It wasn't perfect. But maybe, like Harthvale, it didn't have to be.
He placed it on the edge of the roof, where the wind could brush against it.
Then he lay down on the tiles, hands behind his head, and looked at the stars not with fear, but with something closer to wonder.
And in the silence that followed, as the voidships passed like ghosts overhead, he whispered:
"I was here. I saw it all. And I will remember."
The relay station still stood in the night.
Perched on the far ridge above Harthvale, it had endured orbital tremors, power surges, and weeks of static but it had never gone dark. Not once. The people of the town didn't go up there often anymore. The war had passed, and so had their curiosity.
But for Old Harven, the operator, the ridge had become something else entirely.
A sanctuary. A watchtower of memory.
That night, as the wind rustled faintly through the pines, Harven stepped onto the balcony of the station. He held a warm mug of something strong and dark, brewed from the last can of rich-roast stock the Union had delivered.
The old radio perched beside him on the ledge crackled faintly, and then the speakers hummed to life.
A soft, analog hiss.
Then a melody.
A farewell song.
The kind they played in old kingdoms during harvest send-offs and sailor departures. Gently strummed strings and a woman's voice, quiet and earthy, rising with a wistful tone:
"Stars above me, don't forget me,
When the black wind takes the sea.
Let the hearth keep burning steady,
For the day you come to me…"
Harven tapped the edge of his mug with a finger and hummed along, voice raspy and low, eyes turned upward.
Overhead, in the moonlit sky, three Union voidships moved across the heavens like slow-drifting whales dark bodies with blinking lights, one casting a faint blue reflection across the treetops. Their engines were silent at this distance, but the rumble could be felt in the bones if you stood still enough.
"Leave your mark upon the shoreline,
Etch your name into the stone.
I will wait by fire and starlight,
Till the skies bring you back home…"
Harven smiled faintly. Not at the ships. Not at the moon. But at the song itself old, half-forgotten, and now reborn on the same radio that had once let slip voices of war and death from far above the world.
Now, it gave him something else.
A closing note.
He raised his mug slightly in a quiet toast to the stars, to the town below, to the boy with eyes too wide and a future too uncertain.
Then he took a sip, warm and bitter and grounding.
And sang the final line with the faintest of cracks in his voice:
"When the skies bring you back home…"
Above, the last voidship passed into the clouds.
And the stars returned to silence.