Five Years Later
The training yard behind the Aegis Guard compound rang with the clash of practice weapons. Jyn, now fifteen, moved through the combat forms with mechanical precision, each strike and parry executed flawlessly but without passion. His instructor, a grizzled veteran named Korren, called a halt.
"You're thinking too much again," Korren said, not unkindly. "Combat is instinct, boy. Let your body remember what your mind forgets. The more you practice the less you have to think in real situations and the more instinct and practice come into play."
Jyn nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere. They always were these days, drawn to the secure vault three levels below where the shard waited. He'd been back to see it twice, his parents last research item—unauthorized visits that would have earned him severe punishment if anyone knew. But the guards' patrols followed patterns, and Jyn had inherited his parents' gift for understanding systems and constantly studying patterns.
"Jyn!" A familiar voice called from the yard's entrance. Xander approached, all gangly limbs and barely contained energy, his engineering bag bouncing against his hip. "You done playing soldier? I've got something to show you."
Korren dismissed him with a wave, and Jyn gratefully escaped the yard's confines. Xander had been his solace these past years, the foster brother who'd pulled him back from the edge of complete isolation. The Voss family that had taken Jyn in—Xander's parents—were kind people, engineers themselves who understood the value of giving a traumatized boy space to heal, the Veys and Vosses had been very close in Aegis.
"Remember that cryokinetic theory we were working on?" Xander asked as they walked through Aegis's industrial district. "I think I cracked it. The key is using Crystalist amber and moss as a thermal sink rather than an energy source."
Jyn half-listened, his attention caught by a figure across the street. Elesa moved through the crowd like smoke, her natural grace making everyone else seem clumsy by comparison. She'd shown up at the orphanage two years ago, refusing to speak about her past, communicating primarily through actions rather than words. But she'd gravitated toward Jyn immediately, recognizing a kindred spirit in a hard situation, damaged and determination.
She caught his eye and nodded toward an alley. Jyn and Xander followed, finding her examining a section of wall covered in graffiti—spiraling symbols that looked pretty cool to teenagers.
"whoever is doing this is getting bolder i am starting to see these everywhere she said simply. "Third marking I've found this week."
"The Guard should do something," Xander muttered, but they all knew better. The people doing this operated in shadows, recruiting those desperate enough to experiment with forces they didn't understand. The Confederacy tolerated them as long as they didn't disrupt trade. The goverment ran strictly on trade
"We could do something," Jyn said quietly.
The other two looked at him. It wasn't the first time he'd suggested taking matters into their own hands. The wasteland beyond Aegis's walls called to all of them for different reasons—Xander for the tech waiting to be salvaged, Elesa for the freedom from watching eyes, and Jyn for answers to questions he couldn't quite articulate yet.
"The scavenging runs," Elesa said, understanding immediately. "We're old enough to register with the guild."
"My parents would kill me," Xander said, but his eyes were bright with possibility. "The wasteland is dangerous. Hollowborn, radiation zones, worse things..."
"We're not children anymore," Jyn replied, and something in his voice made the others pause. There was an edge there, sharp as the shard that haunted his dreams. "We can't stay in Aegis forever, pretending the world beyond doesn't exist."
They spent the rest of the afternoon planning, mapping routes, calculating supplies. But Jyn's mind kept drifting to the vault, to the shard that pulled at him like a tide. His parents had died trying to understand it. Perhaps that was their greatest gift to him—not the artifact itself, but the knowledge that some mysteries demanded sacrifice.
That night, Jyn made his third unauthorized visit to the vault. The shard sat in its containment, shielded, deceptively quiet. But when he pressed his hand against the barrier, it pulsed once, twice, three times—a heartbeat in crystal form.
The whispers came stronger now, more coherent. They spoke of the Devourer, though Jyn didn't understand what that meant. They spoke of Nepheos, painting images of impossible landscapes—cities of storm and stone, oceans that burned, mountains that sang. They spoke of his parents, not gone but transformed, waiting in the spaces between worlds.
"I'll find you," Jyn whispered to the shard, to his parents, to himself. "Whatever it takes, I'll understand what you died for."
The shard pulsed again, and for a moment, Jyn could swear he saw faces in its depths—Arthur and Katie Vey, frozen in an eternal moment of realization and horror. Then the image faded, leaving only his own reflection, distorted and strange.
Commander Thalen found him there an hour later, having noticed the disruption in the security logs. But instead of anger, the older man's face showed only understanding.
"You look like him, you know," Thalen said, standing beside Jyn at the barrier. "Your father. Same stubborn set to the jaw, same need to understand everything."
"Did you know them well?" Jyn asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Well enough to know they loved you more than their own lives," Thalen replied.
Jyn's hands clenched into fists. "They should have saved themselves."
"Perhaps. But parents rarely make rational decisions when their children are at stake." Thalen placed a hand on Jyn's shoulder. "The shard will still be here when you're ready for it. But that time isn't now. You need to live first, to become someone capable of handling whatever truth it holds."
The Night Before the Scavenging Run
Jyn stood at the edge of the Crystalist grove that bordered Aegis, the bioluminescent trees casting everything in soft blue-green light. Tomorrow, he, Xander, and Elesa would venture into the wasteland for the first time as registered scavengers. It should have been exciting, but all he felt was the weight of inevitability.
The shard had been quiet for weeks, but tonight it screamed in his mind—not with sound but with presence, like a splinter working its way toward his heart. He'd stopped visiting the vault months ago, but the connection remained, growing stronger rather than weaker with distance.
"Mind if I join?" Elesa emerged from the shadows, moving with her characteristic silence.
"The shard," Jyn said simply. They'd never discussed it directly, but somehow she knew. Perhaps it was the way he sometimes stopped mid-sentence, listening to something only he could hear. Or how his eyes would unfocus, seeing through the present to some other place.
"It's part of you now," she said, not a question but a statement of fact. "Whatever your parents did, whatever happened that night—it bound you together."
Jyn nodded, grateful for her matter-of-fact acceptance. Xander would have wanted to study it, to understand the science. The adults would have worried, maybe even had him tested for contamination. But Elesa just accepted it as another facet of who he was.
"I dream about them sometimes," Jyn admitted. "My parents. They're trying to tell me something, but the words come out as light, as patterns I can't read."
"Maybe you're not meant to read them yet," Elesa suggested. "Maybe you need to become someone else first."
They stood in comfortable silence, watching the Crystalist moss pulse with its own subtle rhythms. The grove was one of the few places in Aegis where the old world and new coexisted peacefully—ancient trees adapted to feed on radiation, the moss fed and the trees protected, their bark producing the amber resin that fueled the Confederacy's economy.
"Whatever happens out there," Elesa said eventually, "we'll face it together."
"Together," Jyn agreed, though part of him knew that some journeys could only be walked alone.
Xander found them there at dawn, his excitement barely contained despite the early hour. He'd spent the night making final adjustments to his cryokinetic rifle, the weapon that would become his signature in the wastes. His engineering bag bulged with supplies and gadgets, each one meticulously catalogued and organized.
"The guild approved our route," he announced, producing a map marked with Confederacy seals. "Sector Seven, grid reference Delta-Nine. Supposed to be good salvage, minimal Hollowborn activity."
Jyn studied the map, noting how their approved route skirted the edges of more interesting territory. The guild always played it safe with new scavengers, keeping them away from the real treasures and dangers that lay deeper in the wasteland. But that was fine for now. This was just the beginning.
As they made their way back through Aegis to collect their gear, they passed the secure facility where the shard was held. Jyn felt it pulse, a greeting or a warning, he couldn't tell which. But he raised his hand slightly in acknowledgment, a promise that he hadn't forgotten, that he would return when the time was right.
The morning sun broke over Aegis's walls, painting the wasteland beyond in shades of gold and shadow. Somewhere out there, answers waited. Somewhere out there, the echo of his parents' last experiment continued to ripple through reality, changing things in ways no one yet understood.
Jyn Vey, orphan of ambition and heir to impossible secrets, took his first steps toward a destiny written in crystal and catastrophe. The shard pulsed once more, then fell silent, waiting with infinite patience for the moment when boy and artifact would be reunited, when the experiment his parents had started would finally reach its conclusion.
Behind them, Aegis continued its morning routines—traders setting up stalls, guards changing shifts, the great Crystalist trees converting radiation into life.