Three Years Earlier

“Six weeks of freedom from the Academy, and this is how you spend them?”

Malan turned from the portion of the Jauda’s walls he was studying and was met with the playful pout of his twin sister. Malan smiled and turned back to the wall, tracing the shimmering patterns of light slowly moving across the wall with a finger. Well, not exactly light, but it was the simplest way Malan could find to describe how it looked.

“Well,” he said simply. “It’s important, Isolde.”

“So important you couldn’t take five minutes after arriving to unpack, or, I don’t know, come and find the little sister you obviously missed so much.”

He grinned. “Maybe I just needed the quiet time to build up the strength to be able to cope with your, ah, winning personality.”

“When is it you leave again? I may have already had enough of you.”

Malan snorted and turned back to his sister, smile wide. “It’s good to see you too, Is.”

Isolde’s pout dissolved into a full-fledged smile and she moved next to him, peering curiously at the wall Malan himself had been staring at.

“Can you really see them here?” She asked, frowning.

“Of course. Studying the spikes of Celestial energy in this system is why the Jauda is here in the first place.”

“I know that. It’s just, it’s one thing learning about it in school and knowing its around,” she said, gesticulating wildly around herself with one hand. “It’s something else entirely to hear that you can see it, or that its right there on the wall. I mean, this stuff is the whole reason space exploration is possible. Hell, its what makes the Guardians what they—”

Isolde cut herself off, clamping her hands to her mouth and looking at him with wide eyes. “I’m sorry!” She said quickly, “I know that must still be pretty raw. You didn’t want to talk about it on our last video call with Mum and Dad.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Malan said, waving her off. “I’d have to be a special kind of dick to get mad at my little sister for something like that.”

Isolde’s anxious frown gave way to a sly grin. “Well, I didn’t want to be the one to say it…”

Malan chuckled. “As if you’d ever pass up the opportunity. Now, how about you let me get to my room and get showered, and we can go pull Mum and Dad away from whatever they’re doing and get dinner together, eh?”

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Malan sat in darkness, head bowed. The steady rhythm of a heart monitor pulsed through the room, made unnaturally loud by the surrounding silence. Tear tracks stained his face, but he’d long since given up trying to wipe them.

He glanced across at his sister. She was sat upright in her hospital bed, sheets tucked to her waist, revealing the pale hospital gown on her upper half and a variety of devices and drips attached to her. Her mouth hung open slightly, and the slight light from the hallway illuminated what was already too-pale skin.

She had woken yesterday, and had allowed herself to be sat up by the nurses, but had not consciously moved or spoken since. She just sat there, eyes vacant, staring into nothing, deathly still.

Malan couldn’t blame her after what she’d seen, what she’d lost.

No, he corrected himself. What he’d stolen from her.

She was sick, and nobody was sure why. Her injuries from the incident had largely been superficial, yet her legs had simply stopped working. There was no movement, no nerve response at all, and no obvious cause. Something about that day on the Jauda had hurt her, and now they were all that was left of their family.

A family broken and ruined by his own actions.

Just as fresh tears threatened at the corner of his eyes, one of the several devices attached to her beeped, and Malan leaped to his feet. He was at her side in seconds, reaching out and taking one of her hands.

“Is’?” He rasped, heart racing. “Is’, can you hear me?”

One of her hands tightened around his, and just for a moment, he saw a hint of focus enter her eyes as she turned to him. She looked at him without really seeing, then, slowly her features shifted. Tightened. Her mouth closed and jaw clenched and Malan felt her hand in his begin to tremble.

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“Is’?” There was a different kind of desperation in his voice now. Broken and pleading.

Her hand slid out of his, and she turned her back on him.

No words left her lips in the months before Malan finally left for the Miotov, but there didn’t need to be any. She had managed to say everything she wanted to without them. Malan made arrangements to ensure she would be fully taken care of using the funds from their parents’ will and Malan’s own meagre savings, before leaving to make sure she always would be.

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Present Day

“Malan!”

The voice barely penetrated the haze of pain and memory, but penetrate it did. Malan blinked, and everything came flooding back to him. The distress signal. The storm. The rift. Oh, fuck—the rift.

“Malan, you have to get up, now!”

He felt the hands shaking him, and looked up to see Talia’s determined frown as she tried to get him to get up and follow. There was an edge to her he’d never seen, a fierceness that didn’t seem to fit the situation, even as desperate as it was. She shook him again.

The thought struck him that he could simply just ignore her. Talia would leave eventually, and he could just stay as the Rift formed on the moon below, rending a tear in the very fabric of reality. He knew from the Jauda that the creatures within wouldn’t grant him a quick death. Maybe he didn’t deserve—

The slap reverberated through his cheekbones, snapping his head back and sending him sprawling back to the floor.

“Motherfucker!” he hissed, rubbing his face as he lay flat on his back. “That did not help this bastard headache.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Talia said meekly, the edge Malan had seen before vanished entirely. “I just couldn’t bring myself to leave you all alone.”

Malan grimaced and pulled himself to his feet. “Thanks,” he said. “Sorry about that. This, ah, isn’t my only experience with a Rift. That message was… hard to hear. Lead the way—I’ll be right behind.”

The look Talia shot him bled sympathy, but she quickly nodded and made for the door, Malan not far behind. Staying had sounded appealing for a moment. A chance to finally not feel the things he did. But the thought of Talia having to live with the decision to leave a person behind was not something Malan could inflict upon somebody else. He knew how deeply that pain cut far too well.

He stumbled after her, booted footsteps against the cool metal of the ship echoing through the corridors of the Miotov, punctuated by the occasional blare of the evacuation alarm. Even in the depths of the station, he could have sworn he could feel the presence of the storm on the planet below, raging in entirely new patterns in response to the disturbance on its moon.

What had once been faint, luminescent glows on the ship’s walls—easy to ignore, to pretend he did not see—now thrummed with energy, drawing him towards them. Urging him to listen.

He refused. He’d always been able to see traces of the Celestial energies that weaved their way through everything, shifting and swirling with minds of their own. It was the force that allowed their ships to travel between systems, and powered their most advanced tech. The force that the Guardians wielded against their enemies, in a way that only they could do.

His ability to interact with them was why he’d been tested for potential membership with the Guardians, and his fascination with them was what had led to the events of the Jauda.

Malan would not make the same mistake twice, not unless there was no other choice.

Instead he ran, half staggering as the assault on his senses from things he was quite sure only he could see grew in intensity. Nausea took hold, and despite the short distance he’d come, he could feel the sweat rolling down his face.

I wait…

The voice thundered through his mind, all encompassing. Sharp. Like the thunder of an ancient earth smith’s hammer against an anvil. The energies that permeated the ship flared, sun bright, and he gasped as though he’d been struck.

Malan’s face hitting the floor with a dull crack was the first he knew about him falling. Pain lanced through his head, and he felt a damp warmth trickling down the side of his face. The voice came again louder than before.

Even through the sleep of fathomless aeons I felt you come. Knew your pain as my own. And still I wait.

He moaned, only vaguely aware of Talia calling his name, consumed by the colossal force of the voice. He couldn’t understand how she could stay upright, whilst he had been left clutching his head, desperately trying to stave off the rush of pain and energy run amok.

Millenia have passed like grains of sand through my fingers, yet suddenly now time is short… I can feel them, clawing and tearing. They come, and soon it will be too late. I wait, Voidborn.

And as though it had never existed, suddenly the voice and the pain was gone, and only the violently swirling energies that Malan had been trying to ignore remained. He glanced at Talia, who crouched beside him once more.

“What the hell was that voice?” he said, rubbing his temples.

There was a silence, and Talia’s concern shifted to something alien to her face. Her eyes widened slightly, jaw and shoulders tensing. “Voice?”

Malan winced. She hadn’t heard it, and now she was looking at him in a way she never had before. Shock and fear, most likely. This wouldn’t be the first time a person had heard an incursion was happening and gone mad. She was probably trying to weigh up how far gone he was, how much danger he presented.

He shook his head, trying to pass himself off as confused. “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said, forcing a pained smile onto his lips. “I hit my head real hard. Sorry—turns out I’m useless in a crisis—let’s keep it moving.”

They rose, but the concerned frown never returned to Talia’s face, and each time she looked back at him, she wore that wide-eyed intense stare, pupils shining like the stars surrounding them. Malan could not tell exactly what emotion burned behind them, but he settled on suspicion, and fear. A reaction he’d well and truly earned during his life.

That, however, did not change quite how much it hurt, coming from her.