Their screams echoed within the dark hangar; muzzle flashes lighting up bloodied faces as the swarm devoured.
My order had left them there. We should’ve pulled out earlier. There’d been no more lives to save within Sector Gamma K/9.
Now, a broken hull revealed the screaming void outside, sucking in anyone who got too close.
Corpses. Blood. Cries of the civilians we were meant to protect. A pounding heart.
“You had it coming, Captain. You left us to die…”
Those words filled my ears as the aliens shifted to tear into me instead, ripping my flesh apart in the darkest corners of space.
A tomb where no one would morn my passing.
I snapped awake in a pool of my own sweat. The bed sheets wrapped around my limbs were cold and soaked through, and it was in the middle of the night. Or as much night as it ever got out here among the stars.
Only the dimming lights ever indicated the passing of time on the carrier, along with the quiet of a thousand children asleep. Not that things were quiet to me.
The echoes of my death, along with the last time I ever saw my crew alive, thundered within my mind. Pained images flashed across my eyes, and there were no mental mods to dull them. There wasn’t even a bottle.
All I could do was rub the fuzz from my eyes and put on my glasses. As I pushed myself upright in bed, however, my vision restored, I found that the unrest wasn’t limited to the confines of my mind.
Each dusky light within my room was flickering, and the carrier creaked like a ship at sea. Just that up here, there were no waves to rock it. At least not ones of water.
Wide awake in an instant, I slipped out of bed as my stomach kept twisting restlessly. ‘We never made it to Wochir-11 at the scheduled time. Our engines were drained by a fluctuation in the Void, forcing us to emergency land on an alien planet…’
Eleven days had passed since I returned to this body. I’d almost started to think that fate wouldn’t catch up to me. But here it was, knocking on the door as I swiftly grabbed my tablet.
A few commands, and the entire BROW/WING’s monitor system was at my disposal. I’d hacked into the ship’s main frame a few days ago – just to see if I could. Out of boredom – and now, the darkness of space, dotted with stars, spread out across my screen.
It wasn’t like I expected to see whatever cosmic anomaly would, had, might — language is not really made for time slips, is it? — drain our ship, but the need to know kept my eyes glued to the screen.
One question echoed within my mind. The same question I’d kept endlessly repeating to myself during every waking hour: would the future I knew come to pass?
I’d barely switched through that first handful of cameras as the feed flickered out of focus and died. Something had cut it off.
Chewing my lip, I stared at black screen for a moment.
A good sign, or no? Did I want three hundred years of hardships and strife to have been a lie?
Never bothering to answer the question, I slipped on my pajamas shirt – finishing the set – strapped the satchel for my tablet across my chest, and made my way over to the door.
The red light indicating that it was locked still shone. It seemed the ship’s base functions remained in place, along with curfew hours.
As I leaned in closer to inspect the wall-mounted terminal, however, my tablet came to life on its own. An animated key with a skull for its head appeared on the screen, slowly turning as blocky Ha! Ha!s jumped out of its mouth.
A moment later, the door’s light had switched to green, and it slid open. Well, that’s handy…
It was the first time I ever saw concrete evidence of what those stats and skills I’d earned could do. It made me rethink their usefulness as I left my room behind.
Maybe I should’ve put even more effort into leveling them up?
Outside, everything was cast in shadows. No one was allowed out in our shared unit after curfew, and it was in eerie silence that I made my way over to that second exit.
If not for the knowledge that we would survive, those blinking lights out there would probably have scared me shitless. There’s no space farer who doesn’t have an intrinsic fear towards malfunctioning technology.
There were nicer ways to die than to be…or was there? Not that I’d experienced, at least. It did fill me with nervous energy though, as I raised my hand towards that second red light, and it was only after a short delay that it switched to green, and the door jerked halfway open.
Was the Skeleton Key getting exhausted, or is the carrier’s electronics this bad off already?
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That skull was still silently laughing upon the screen as I slipped the tablet into its satchel, stepping into the hallway outside.
𐫰 𐫰 𐫰
Without the artificial sunlight of a hundred lamps to illuminate that garden, it was beneath starry skies I walked as coarse grass brushed against my toes once more. I’d never bothered finding my shoes, and now, with no atmospheric interference or sharp lights to obscure my vision, the great void was sooner a canvas of color than velvety black above me.
Violets, reds, and orange hues mixed in twisting nebulae where the cosmic dust caught and refracted the light of a billion stars. Greens, yellows, and burning blues outlined unexplored galaxies and distant worlds.
Even when everything had been ending, I’d always found this view breathtakingly beautiful. And now, for the first time in forever, it seemed rife with life, potential, and hope.
As I walked there beneath alien trees on the precipice of infinity, I’d almost forgotten my reason for being out there. That quiet voice, however, swiftly brought me crashing back to reality.
“Quite something, isn’t it?”
I snapped around, bounced back, and with my tiny fists raised and shoulders rounded, I stared at the lanky figure standing there. My heart was racing, but Celian just smiled back at me. He was alone; his usual guard nowhere to be seen.
Although muted to blend with the shadows, the markings on his face were shifting between a dozen hues at once as he walked over to join me.
Despite his looming stature, he moved with a flowing grace that was almost ethereal – his every step a perfect, calculated dance move that barely even upset the grass wherever his feet landed. It was as if he was floating.
Before I could reclaim my breath to answer, Celian had raised a finger to his lips, directing my gaze back toward the Void. Towards something moving out there, far closer than stars or galaxies, though no less massive.
It was as if my eyes had only now adjusted to the right scale to take it in, and I froze in place.
A serpent of nebulous clouds and shimmering rings — like a living constellation — shifted out there, coiling and uncoiling itself and leaving glowing star dust behind.
The entire carrier groaned as it passed over us once more, the rings that bound its segmented body together glowing brighter in time with the dimming lights around us.
It was feeding off us, siphoning the thermal core that kept the BROW/WING together.
There was nothing I could’ve done to stop it. I could only watch as it shifted once more, its colors changing in time with Celian’s tattoos. At times, they glowed brighter, causing his skin to almost seem translucent.
“That…thing, you’re resonating with it?” I asked with bated breath, my voice no louder than Celian’s had been. He hadn’t blinked a single time, eyes locked to the stars shifting above us.
I’d once heard that Luminesari never really died of old age. Their skin just kept getting paler and brighter the more experienced they grew, their tattoos expanding until, at last, there was only light left – stardust to join their ancestors in the great celestial mind.
Then again, I’d also met several learned Luminesari with deeper, more purple skin as well, carrying impressive looking tattoos of their own right who denied such notions as ‘ancient humbug’.
Celian was powerful, that much I knew, and the being hovering above us more terrifying still.
“Some say that the Nebula Serpent is an ancient being that has slipped out of our ancestors gardens,” he gently said, eyes still lost in its endless coils. “A good omen, and a sign to set us on the right path.”
“Your ancestors gardens…?” I asked. Even after three centuries of serving the Triumvirate, there was very little I knew about the Luminesari. They’d willingly share a thousand things, as long as it wasn’t about themselves. They relished the mysticism that surrounded their species too much. “Is that what you will become when you die?”
“Only those who have gone truly knows what awaits on the other side,” Celian said. “The living merely gleams their whispers; whispers that speak of a thousand different truths and possibilities of our existence.
Having perhaps anticipated my question, he continued, “Fate does not flow like a gentle river. It is a violent, turbulent, and twisting thing. The cosmos always changes, and so do we.
He looked towards me. “It is said that in ancient times, my people were born without mouths. Making noise was considered a crude way of communicating, meant for lesser species who were deaf to the teachings of those who came before. For eons, we lived in silence, our senses open to their whispers.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“More sentient races joined my ancestors in the cosmos, and curiosity got the better of them. Many grew tired of the slow path we were set upon and chose to move against it. They reached out to other species, all to learn the secrets and knowledge that’d so far been forbidden to us.
“Some say we grew blind to the celestials’ teachings that day, others that we took control of our own fate.”
‘Only you know the future that must be prevented…’
“What do you think?” I asked after a moment of silence.
“I believe being able to talk makes for some curious encounters,” Celian said, and for a moment, it almost seemed as if he smiled.
Not that his expression really changed even as the serpent above uncoiled itself one last time, dissipating into the starry canvas. “It’s a blessed thing, to be able to witness a Nebula Serpent,” he continued. “Even my kin have not witnessed its guidance in generations. It seems the cosmos has great plans for you, Young Nyamien.”
His eyes turned my way just in time for light to come back to life around us, blaring red as several alarms went off throughout the carrier, echoing down the hallways. Within a minute, they’d be filled with hurried steps and yelled orders as well.
“To them, it will just have been an engine failure,” Celian said as he calmly walked past me, his steps unfazed even as the ship rocked around us. “That knowledge will allow them to sleep sounder at night.”
I could hear the thundering roar and vibrations as the BROW/WING’s emergency thrusters were engaged, desperately trying to stabilize us as the gravitational pull of a nearby planet had grabbed hold of us.
It caused the entire carrier to twist around me, and I could see the roiling clouds of the planet that was trying to claim us, having spun into view as we desperately fought to get away.
I knew we wouldn’t succeed.
Fate had come for us, and fuzzy as my memories of this entire time were, my pulse began to race faster as the meaning of those emergency lights became clear to me.
It was never an emergency landing that delayed us. We crashed.
Levels Added:
Stealth > 1
Trespassing > 1
History, Luminesari > 1
Achievement(s) Unlocked:
Star Gazer,
> Wanderlust:
>
> +5%
Restless Sleeper,
> Odds Of Waking Up In Times Of Need:
>
> +20%
>
> Chance For Satisfying Sleep:
>
> -10%
>
> Stress Levels:
>
> +5%
Witnesses Cosmic Being(s) (1/?),
> Connection To Astral Plane:
>
> +5%
>
> Stress Levels:
>
> +5%
>
> Confidence:
>
> -5%