Malan groaned, a strangely synthetic voice lingering in his ears from deep in the blackness of unconsciousness. He was warm. Joyously so. Gentle heat seeped into his very bones, warming him at his core. It reminded him of waking up on his birthday as a child. One of the several planets he’d grown up on had a winter that reached its height on his birthday.

They’d spent several years there. Mornings of waking up in thick blankets to a lit fire—albeit an artificial one—and hot cocoa. Snowball fights with Isolde, and coming back to the fire, freezing and damp from melted snow.

The heat warming him now felt like that, and he was reluctant to open his eyes, or stir even a little bit, for fear of dispelling the dream. That, after all, was what he had to be doing now. There was no other possibility. Malan remembered everything—how could he ever forget? But here he felt none of the pain that wracked him out there. Hell, just being able to breathe was a privilege he only realised now he’d been underappreciating.

Which in itself proved this was a dream. His suit was torn. He had no oxygen. Yet he was breathing air now, clean and crisp and wonderful. That thought made him freeze a little. It was all too perfect. Perhaps he’d already died?

“It was a close run thing, but not yet, boy.”

The gossamer thin voice should have scared him. As should the dry, rattly breathing he could could hear nearby. Instead, he felt a sense of peace wash over him, and his muscles relaxed rather than tensed.

“Well, if you are him, stop your lazing about on the floor—let’s get a proper look at you.”

Malan frowned, opening his eyes slowly, expecting to see any number of things, and finding none of them.

Instead, his eyes found a dusty stone fireplace, stood amongst the field of broken and crumbling rock. At first he wondered if that was the source of the heat, but clearly no fire had been lit there in a very long time. He was lying amongst the rubble of some long ruined castle, going by the shape of the shattered stonework and mostly crumbled walls. However, when he tried to look to the sky to get his bearings, all he saw was the purest of white, unending in every direction.

Swallowing, he clambered to his feet, and focused his attention on the only other thing present. A dais still stood untouched, polished stone standing in stark contrast to the ruins surrounding it, and in the very centre, a throne sat with great stone wings that stretched out behind it, the carved feathers that lined every inch curved like flame.

It was not empty.

The source of the voice sat, leant back as though too tired to lift itself even an inch from its seat. It was wrapped in bundles of loose cloth, tattered and patched, so only it’s face and hands were visible outside of it. Malan sucked in a breath. This was the first thing to give Malan pause since he’d woken.

The shape was, or had once been, a man. His skin was a leathery grey, as tattered and pocked as his clothes were, and deep cracks ran across its surface, stodgy blood seeping from between them. He was skeletal thin, skin taut over bone, revealing too much gum around his teeth, and what was left of his hair lay across his head in blackened wisps. It was as though this man had been burned alive, and somehow survived.

A glint of light caught his eye, and he looked to the throne’s armrests. Beneath the man’s decaying fingers was a golden crown that swam with a light all of its own. Three iridescent jewels shone in the very centre. They had no colour, yet shone more vividly than any Malan had ever seen in his life. Malan’s mouth opened slightly, awestruck for a moment by the sight of it.

The old man chuckled, a terrible, throaty sound, like he was grinding rocks together in the back of his mouth.

“A beautiful thing,” he said, blackened fingers running across the crown’s surface. “My neck has grown too weak to bear it’s weight. I’m not accustomed to repeating myself, boy. Come!”

Malan blinked, and moved to comply before he was fully aware of what he was doing. That same strange impulse guided him to just in front of the right arm of the throne, and he found himself dropping to one knee.

“So you are the one, eh?” The man said, reaching out to touch him. “Frail. Frailer than I could have imagined…”

The man’s fingers brushed his temple, and immediately fell away to dust, leaving him with a pair of crumbling stumps.

“You’re one to talk,” Malan snorted, before he could stop himself.

“Ha! But there is spirit! Good, good. You will need that aplenty. I am glad I could see you before the burning was done. It is a shame. A few hundred years earlier, and I could have—”

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The man hesitated, and held up his hand as it crumbled away into ash. It didn’t stop, and soon his entire arm was beginning to disintegrate, and a gentle breeze swept through the ruins to carry away the dust. Malan didn’t know what to say or do, or how to react, but the man simply smiled.

“All things come to ash, boy, and I have lit this world’s darkness for too long. The flame is yours to keep now. Do not fail.”

“Fail at what?” Malan asked. “What light?!”

But it was too late, the man let out a long sigh and a peaceful smile bloomed on his decrepit face.

The burning accelerated, and within another few moments, the man was gone, and the white light that surrounded the ruins began to overpower everything, until it was all that Malan could see. For a second, he lay adrift in nothing, before—

He gasped, taking painful, desperate breaths. The burning in his lungs was back, and the torn suit. Malan hissed, and his arms gave way beneath him, depositing him onto cool metal. The pain had come back, too. Every nerve in his body screamed at him, and he trembled under the assault of it, even as the Abyss howled from outside of….wherever he was.

Extracting himself from a pile on the floor was considerably more difficult this time. He managed it though, albeit slowly and with an awful lot of swearing as his body let him know in no uncertain terms that he should be staying on the ground.

“It is good you have risen. The shields will not hold for long.”

A synthetic voice echoed around the empty room he’d found himself in. He glanced around the gloom, looking for any sign that the room was anything more than the inside of the sphere. There was very little, besides in the centre, where two white pillars stood at a little over waist height, with crystalline domed tops.

“You’re the voice from my head,” Malan said, looking for some hint of what to do next. “From the Miotov. I’m guessing you’re this Starbound?”

“Indeed.”

“Then—am I compatible? Will this work? Talia seemed pretty sure I would be, but…”

“You should already have the notifications in your status window, Voidborn. Simply think about accessing the status panel, and the system will show you.”

Malan blinked, but thought better of asking any of the thousand questions racing through his mind, given the hideous abominations doing their level best to get in here and kill him and what not. Instead, he focused on exactly what the voice was telling him to do. Focus on the status panel.

“What the—” He staggered back as a panel fizzled into existence right before his eyes. He narrowed his eyes, and read.

Status

Name: Malan Tierin

Race: Voidborn [1]

Alignment: N/A

Profession: Pilot Lv. 1

Class: N/A

Stats

Energetics: 50

Synergetics: 50

Cognizance: 50

Quite honestly, he wasn’t sure what to do with all of that information, but two options at the bottom of the menu drew his eye: Notifications, and Skills. Based on what the Starbound had said, he was looking for his notifications. To his delight, the menu shifted immediately to that panel in response to his thoughts.

Last Notification:

…Integrating Pilot…

*****

Integration Successful.

Nexus Matrix Active.

****************

Pilot Name: Malan Tierin

Race: Human, Voidborn

****************

Starbound Compatibility Confirmed

Welcome to the System, Pilot.

He licked his lips. That confirmed it. A lifetime of dreaming, and despite his life going to shit twice in the worst imaginable way, he’d still wound up here. Starbound.

A buzzing in his head alerted him a moment before alerted him to the arrival of another notification.

New Mission: Survive!

Escape this system with your life. Mission Rewards will be performance dependent.

1. Complete bonding with your Starbound. Place either hand on each control rod, and take command of your ship.

Malan only hesitated for a moment at the strangeness of these notification windows. So little was known about the Starbound and their pilots, so heavy was the security around them. But they were so unlike anything else out there that Malan wasn’t surprised that there was weirdness involved, and he was prepared to roll with any amount of it if it would get him out of here alive.

The hows and whys were for when you weren’t about to get your face ripped into pieces by cosmic horrors. He strode, as best he could with his screaming muscles, to the central platform and stood between the pillars—control rods, apparently—and placed the palms of each hand upon the crystal atop each one.

He took a breath, and the Starbounds voice rang out once more.

“It is good to finally meet you, Malan,” it said, and light began to pulse from Malan’s hands and into the crystals, flowing through the rods and arching out through the walls of the sphere like bolts of white lightning. The energy reverberated through him, and his vision shifted, and another presence flickered across his awareness like dancing flame.

“Your spirit has joined with mine, and reforged and renamed me in its fire. I am Tanwen. Shall we fly?”