The wind howled like a chorus of the damned as Lucius Argent trudged through the snow, each gust biting into his flesh with icy teeth. The barren landscape stretched endlessly before him, an unbroken white that blurred the horizon and sky into a singular, oppressive canvas. The snow beneath his heavy boots crunched, a staccato accompaniment to the lament of the wind. He was a lone figure against the vastness, as if the planet itself had swallowed all life save for his own weary existence.
With every step, Lucius fought not only the biting frost but also the crushing weight of his own thoughts. The frigid air burned his lungs, each breath a reminder of the stark contrast between the inner heat of his fervor and the cold desolation that surrounded him. His heart matched the rhythm of his march, a relentless drumbeat pushing him forward, even as his body screamed for respite.
Above, the sky was a dome of unforgiving gray, and the sun a feeble smear of light offering no warmth. It eluded his eyes, and stayed as little more than a mocking reminder of the daylight world he had been cast from. The void of despair in his chest seemed to expand with the landscape, and he tightened his coat against the howling wind that scoured the chilling tundras of the frozen planet.
Once a decorated Captain of the United Republic’s Aether Elite, Lucius' identity was now reduced to that of a hunted animal. He was less than a fugitive; he was a specter, a ghost of benighted fortune haunting the fringes of the spaceways, and smuggling himself from jump gate to jump gate in the hopes of eluding a capture that seemed all-too-inevitable.
The accolades and commendations he had once earned were now worth little more than ash, and his plethora of valor medals and distinguished service awards were overshadowed by the declaration of treason that had been branded onto his name.
His selfless deeds had been all but erased by the very government he had sworn to protect, his record expunged, and his contributions—that which he had risked life and limb to attain—scrubbed clean from the annals of the Republic's history. They had turned on him with a ruthlessness that he had never anticipated, labeling him as a turncoat, and manipulating the truth to scapegoat him for the sins of one Leopold Garvin.
The United Defense Minister’s dust-addicted murderer of a son.
Lucius had been the one to find out the boy’s sins, and had been naive enough to trust the system to abide by the moral laws he’d fought across a dozen warzones to defend. He had kept faith with his superiors, his government, and his species—and the result had been a betrayal that swept his world out from under him.
Had it not been for the aid of his team, all nine by then dead or on the run themselves as a reward for their fidelity, he’d have been caught and executed before he’d had time to think. They had been given the command. They had been ordered to bring him in, and give him to the corruption of the state they’d sworn to serve—in those orders laid bare for them to witness.
They had refused, and some of them had died to deliver him to temporary safety.
The pursuit since that moment had been relentless. It was a manhunt that spanned star systems, leaving Lucius with no respite, no sanctuary, and no shelter against the coming storm. The few other sapient species in their arm of the Milky Way had eagerly joined the hunt in kind; thrilled to be able to prosecute their vengeance against a human that had cost some of them their most celebrated warriors.
Lucius had been lauded as a Cultivator of rare talent, a recognition which had allowed him to survive as an orphan in an uncaring universe—sheltered and raised by the military he would later be expected to serve. He had mastered Force, one of the most powerful and dangerous of the many schools of aetheric power mankind had learned to manipulate. It was only that power, that control over gravity and space itself, which had saved him from certain death over the course of the last fourteen Solar months.
He had been betrayed. He had been forsaken. He had been framed.
But the truth, that precious and elusive thing, was a commodity too expensive for a man on the run. It was a luxury he could not afford as he sought to escape the inexorable reach of his pursuers, and fled across light years of space. The reality of his innocence mattered little in the grand scheme. In the eyes of the Republic he was guilty, and his refusal to surrender was only more proof of that fact. He knew that to be true, for he himself had once been the prosecutor of such warrants. He himself carried with him the blood of countless fugitives.
How ironic.
Now he was the prey in a cosmic game of cat and mouse, and the hunters were closing in.
Lucius came to a halt when a shadow obstructed his view of the snow, and raised his eyes to the looming construct he’d seen during his mad dash from orbit, and his desperate Force-assisted escape from the starship that had finally failed him. It had served him well after he’d been forced to steal it, some six months prior.
Now it was just more detritus, smashed and destroyed against the frozen hellscape of whatever desolate world he’d blind warped to. After all, Star Drives weren’t designed to operate outside of established hyperlanes stabilized by jump gates. He had overriden those warnings and jumped anyway. Jumped anywhere to escape.
He’d survived, and his pursuers had found his Hole signature, and followed him into the endless dark with courage and perseverance the Hunter in him begrudgingly had to commend. Then, after a desperate attempt at escaping their plasma lances long enough to recharge the Star Drive, he’d taken the fatal hit that had sent him careening into the godforsaken deathworld he found himself on.
A world with a single construct which he had reached at last.
The ancient facility towered before him, a colossal structure of unknown make jutting out from the ice like the bones of a leviathan. Its walls were scarred by time and etched with aetheric runes that hummed with a latent power. Even from miles away, he had felt their power—felt the electric crackle of their potency. He had hoped to find something with which to make his escape, or failing that, his last stand. If it was to be the end of the road, he wanted to take as many with him as he could.
Call it pettiness. Call it pride. He’d stopped caring about shame months ago.
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Lucius stood silently before the ancient structure, its entrance a forbidding portal carved from stone and metal that seemed to predate any form of human works he knew of from his studies. The darkness seemed to pulsate with a life of its own, and throb with an unheard heartbeat that felt in sync with his own. The dread of unspoken secrets and long-forgotten truths permeated everything, and his aetheric senses screamed at him to flee.
There was an air of inevitability when he finally mustered the courage—a feat that proved more difficult than he’d initially thought—and moved toward the threshold, each step a tacit acceptance of the bleak fate that awaited him within those hallowed and haunted depths. There was no retreat for him any longer. Be it the frozen tundras behind or the abyssal darkness ahead, he would very likely be making his last stand.
Better to do so somewhere he could not be targeted from orbit.
The vast doors, remnants of a time that he presumed to be beyond human memory, stood ajar as if to welcome him. They were adorned with inscriptions, aetheric runes that throbbed faintly with the ghost of their once-potent magic. Lucius reached out instinctively, hesitated, and then let his fingertips brush against the etched symbols. When he felt the thrum of ancient power stir beneath his skin, a chill that was not from the cold of the deathworld crept up his spine.
Every instinct in him once more screamed to flee.
Instead, he crossed the threshold.
The atmosphere constricted around him when he did, and he felt a momentary sense of mammalian panic at the feeling of sudden compression. The air inside was unnaturally still, as though the very essence of the place was holding its breath. A sense of suffocation crept up on Lucius. It was like a heavy cloak had been woven from the threads of arcane energy that permeated the structure, hung with weights of forbidding malice, and draped atop him.
The preservation spells, invisible to the eye but not to his aetheric senses, were potent enough to mummify the silence itself. It was with no small amount of awe that he traced the impacts they had on the air, and with some measure of trepidation that he realized, this close to the source, his arcane dating pegged them at over sixty thousand years old.
Older than even the earliest of primitive human records.
Lucius’ breath materialized in the frozen air as he slowly advanced inside the cavernous facility, forming a cloud of vapor that seemed to hang before him before being swallowed by the oppressive darkness. The light from the entrance, once a comforting tether to the outside world, retreated with every step Lucius took into the bowels of the prison. There was a finality in that fading luminosity, like the severing of an umbilical cord to the world he once knew.
Behind him in that dwindling light laysanity and common sense, and a life he had once thought well-lived.
He pressed on without a second glance.
Lucius descended, and the incline of the passage drew him ever downward into the planet’s icy guts. The only sound was the echo of his own footsteps, a haunting rhythm that became the heartbeat of the tomb-like corridors. Each step was like thunder in the silence, too loud and too alive; an intrusion upon the sanctity of death that the prison had embraced.
While he descended further into the darkness, a creeping unease took hold of him, and he risked some precious stores of his already-depleted mana to ignite a simple lightsphere in the air beside him. Its glow was a pale white beacon in the overwhelming gloom, casting shadows that twisted and writhed along the walls like tormented spirits. The light from the aetheric construct, its very existence a steady drain on his exhausted reserves; revealed more runes, and they flickered in response as if recognizing the lightsphere’s arcane signature.
The shadows, stirred into unnatural motion by the light, seemed to mock him with their capering. They played tricks on his eyes, shapes forming and dissolving in the periphery of his vision, and suggesting the movement of unseen watchers lurking just out of sight. He turned in a wide and careful arc, the light of his construct distorting as it met the air and followed in his wake.
The prison’s atmosphere was thick with the residue of spellwork and time.
Each flickering shadow felt like the ghostly touch of the facility's former inhabitants, reaching out across the chasm of years to assail whatever intruder dared to carry within their domain the warmth of the living.
Upon finding no ambushing foe, and no nightmare predator, Lucius took a steadying breath. With no energy-rich planet to meditate upon for regeneration, and no mana draughts on his person, he could only rely on his passive atmospheric absorption to restore his energy.
It was a grim prospect. He had been in similar situations across several of his deployments, but never in such dire straits—and never alone without anyone to watch his back, nor to aid his amelioration of mana deprivation. The magic he’d been forced to harness in escaping the starship at terminal velocity had beggared him, and he’d need days to recover to full strength.
Thus the prison.
Thus the gamble.
The further Lucius ventured, the more the prison seemed to awaken, as if his very presence was a catalyst for some ancient mechanism set into motion eons ago. The air became colder, a creeping frost that seemed to emanate from the stones themselves, and which whispered with the voices of forgotten cultivators imbued within the runes.
Echoes of sapients long dead, and unable to find rest even after their end.
He’d heard of such magic. He’d even seen it, during an ill-fated trip to the catacombs on Thraxen V. It had been foul then, and he could safely say his opinion of the practice hadn’t changed. It stirred no fear in him to hear the susurrations, but the intonations did give him pause—for it sounded like nothing he’d ever heard, even among the more reptilian alien species. The echoes’ language was indecipherable, a symphony of hisses and hums that might have been speech—or warnings.
Lucius passed through archways that led into chambers each more foreboding than the last, and filled with the stale air of uncounted centuries—somehow still breathable, for all that it made him feel suffocated even as he inhaled it. The architecture was grandiose, designed not merely to incarcerate but to oppress the spirit, and to remind its prisoners of their insignificance against the vast weight of whatever empire had built such a monstrous facility.
In those spaces, the echoes of his footsteps were devoured whole by the immensity of the void in which they sat, and the uncounted number of mocking echoes.
Statues of ancient humanoids lined the walls, their features noble and austere, yet carved with an artistry that commanded awe and terror in equal measure. They loomed over Lucius as he strode through their ancient abode, their eyes empty yet seeming to follow him; and their expressions a riddle that spoke of both majesty and malice.
The glow from his lightsphere played across their faces, throwing grotesque parodies of their visages across the cavernous rooms, and filling the empty spaces with demonic specters of shadow and light.
He paid them no heed, and even frowned in annoyance at the whispering echoes, for all that they made his blood run cold in opposition to his unmoved exterior.
He had seen far worse among the aliens he’d slain for his nation’s safety, and yet somehow the prison made him feel like a hare being slowly constricted by a predatory serpent.
He had thought he had found the worst of the facility’s menace already.
Almost as if it were aware of his assumption, the prison quickly proved him wrong.
The corridor ahead abruptly funneled into a narrower pathway, and the air grew denser. The passage before him was charged with a foreboding energy, and yet there was no other path. It was either forward, or back to the desolate surface. The choice was no choice at all, and so swallowing down the first whispers of true fear he’d felt in twenty years, he pressed on.