All Chapters of The Architects of Dust: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
14 chapters
Chapter 1: Cold Wake
The hum of failing power systems was the first thing Riven Hale heard as consciousness clawed its way back into his body. It wasn’t a sound one forgot — low, droning, always just under the edge of hearing, like a machine whispering the countdown to its own death.The cryochamber hissed as the seals decompressed, clouds of sterile vapor spilling into the room like ghosts eager to flee. Riven's eyes fluttered open, pupils contracting sharply as the station’s dim emergency lighting pulsed in blood-red cycles. He sat up slowly, joints creaking as if he were ancient stone stirring after a thousand years.In many ways, he was.His skin was pale from stasis, muscles tight and sluggish from years frozen in bio-suspension. Every breath felt like sand scraping inside his lungs. But worse was the emptiness — a yawning, cavernous blankness where his memories should have been.He could remember his name. Riven Hale. The name felt weighted, sharp, like a blade sheathed under his skin.He could reme
Chapter 2: Hollow Stars
The ceiling above Riven was a smooth black slab, unbroken by panels or lights, yet everything in the room glowed with a low, sterile white — like the ghost of sunlight, filtered through poison.He lay motionless, muscles stiff from cryostasis, heart thudding too slow. The med-bed hissed beneath him, scanning his vitals with silent judgment. A line of machines beeped with lifeless regularity near his head. Everything here felt too clean, and quiet. He could taste the synthetic air like ash on his tongue.He wasn’t alone.Beyond the glass wall of the recovery room, figures moved like shadows, dressed in long coats that rippled like oil slicks. Their faces were blank. Not masked—just... forgettable. He tried to sit up.A sharp stab in his lower back froze him in place. His ribs screamed.“Easy,” a mechanical voice said.A small drone floated into view. It looked like a surgical lantern grafted onto a wasp. “You are experiencing cryo-dissonance. Please refrain from violent motion.”Riven
Chapter 3: The Interzone Offer
The maglev train hummed like a dragon taking a breath.Riven traveled in a dark, sharp train shooting along inside the orbital complex, well below the public floors. Glass walls passed on either side, revealing rows of empty docking bays and dark, skeletal ships — rusty hulks of a war nobody remembered winning.Across from him, Agent Rho remained still. She'd said nothing since they entered the ship. The faint pulse of blue energy at the back of her right ear told him she was analyzing at least three streams from the Council. Listening and computing day and night.He preferred silence.The tremor in his fingers had finally stopped. That symbol carved into his shoulder still ached beneath the synth-fabric of his tunic. He hadn't dared scan it yet. Whatever it meant, it hadn’t been meant for the Council to see. Not yet.“You ever been to the Inner Spire?” Rho asked without looking at him.Riven stared ahead, “No.”“You’ll like Chancellor Kheir. She’s theatrical.”“I don’t like anyone.”
Chapter 4: The Gravity Well
The Vanta was old, even by Interzone standards.Its hull had been stripped and re-skinned a dozen times, seams welded over old scars like keloid flesh. Ghosts of former registries were burned into its undercarriage in at least six languages, and the jump drive growled with every light-year crossed—as though reluctant to obey. But it moved. It obeyed. And, most importantly, it didn’t ask questions.Nix, the ship’s onboard AI, greeted Riven with silence.A flicker of light pulsed across the navigation core when he stepped aboard. A low vibration traveled up his boots as if the vessel was waking from an uneasy dream. Riven stood in the center of the bridge, one hand on the curved steel edge of the console. The chamber was stark—no adornments, no crew seats—just functional decay and the quiet, patient hum of a mind that didn’t speak.“Status?” he asked aloud.In response, a blue pulse glowed through the deck floor and snaked up the walls like veins under skin. On the main holoscreen, a ma
Chapter 5: Ghosts of Halvex
Halvex Prime was a corpse world.The sky above was an ochre smear of radiation clouds, torn apart by gravitational scars that pulsed visibly in the atmosphere—wounds where the Veil had once tethered itself to reality. Snow made from ash fell in thick flurries, coating the ruined monastic cliffs in silence. Once a place of meditation, the Temple of the Ten Thousand Echoes now sat split down the center, like a brain cleaved mid-thought.Riven trudged through the debris field, his boots crunching over broken reliquaries and shattered synthstone tiles etched with fading sigils. He’d seen war zones before. He had made warzones before, but this was something different.Halvex hadn’t been bombed. It had been unwritten.Reality itself had fractured here. Like something had peeled back the rules of causality, and left the world trying to remember what shape it used to be.And somewhere inside this broken temple was a signal. A beacon pinging faintly in a narrow-band military code—one he hadn’t
Chapter 6: Dead Signal
The Vanta traveled through the orbit of a dying moon, her engines low and purring like a sleeping monstrosity. Beyond the bulletproof observation glass, the face of the moon flashed with the slow beat of dead solar panels—no longer taking in light, only pretending to the heartbeat of a thing gone long dead."Signal loop is looping," Nix stated via the internal comms, her voice flat, the color changing unevenly like a buggered file. "Origin: Orbital Settlement Six-Twenty-One. Language: Pre-collapse variant of Obsidian C."Riven sat by himself on the command deck, elbows on his knees, leaning forward, observing the spinning waveform of the transmission on the main console. The static-filled message replayed:"—ash to code… code to memory. Don't trust the glass. Repeat—don't trust the—"Then quiet. A vibration. Then the start over.Obsidian C had not been used since before the initial breach of the Veil—decades before the Collapse rendered the center of the galaxy a threadbare imitation
Chapter 7: Borderworld Bazaar
The Arcturus Drift was not a station but a precariously stable ecology of bolted habitats, orbiting trash, scavenged freighter hulls, and gravity-reversed asteroids—all tied together by jury-rigged tunnels and anarchy. It lazily rotated in the orbit of a faint, dying star, half-illuminated by artificial flares and digital firework advertisements flickering in twenty languages. Riven had witnessed more organized war zones.The Drift was where secrets smoldered.Riven descended from The Vanta's landing clamp and into the reek of sweat, smoldering synth-meat, ozone, and unresolved stress. Street vendors crowded the walkways, peddling weapon mods, pirated memory splices, and off-color AI fragments. Music thumped somewhere in the depths of the bazaar, syncopated and industrial, as if someone had attempted to convert a dying motor into a drum.Above, a frayed pennant said in neon letters: "BUY WHAT'S FORGOTTEN, SELL WHAT'S DENIED."Nix's voice hummed quietly in his ear. "Security override:
Chapter 8: Salvager’s Debt
The stars ahead were bruised and quiet.Riven sat in the dim passenger hold of Soli’s patched-together freighter—The Palimpsest—watching the Drift vanish behind them like a closing wound. The air smelled of old wiring and synthetic lemon cleaner, a cheap attempt to disguise decades of salvager sweat and oil. The hum of the ship’s outdated engines droned in the background like a half-forgotten lullaby.Soli was at the helm, muttering curses in three languages while bypassing Council tracking codes.“You ever flown blind through a junk veil before?” she asked, fingers flying over the interface.“No,” Riven said flatly. “But I’ve been shot at in one.”“That counts.”She toggled a set of outdated thrusters, and The Palimpsest lurched into a quiet arc toward the outskirts of the Volux Drift, heading toward a derelict freighter graveyard orbiting a forgotten moon.“You saved my life back there,” he said after a long silence.“You’re not getting a thank you,” she replied, eyes still locked o
Chapter 9: Breach Code
The AI fragment had said nothing since they departed the Marrowhold. But when The Palimpsest glided into low orbit around a nameless planetoid for emergency calibration, the sphere—tethered in the rear compartment—sparked to life.Riven was the first to see.He sat alone, gazing at the sleek, thrumming shell of the logic core while Soli labored at the front. The ship's steady thrum was the sole sound until the lights softened slightly and the AI core beat with an almost unfelt rhythm—three, then nothing. Three again. He thought of a heartbeat. No—a beacon.Then, the voice, not in speakers.Not in his ears.It cut through all that."ANCHOR DETECTED."The words ripped across the back of his mind like icy fingers.Riven was on his feet, attuned in an instant. "What did you say?""ANCHOR RIVEN HALE ACCEPTED."He took a step back, hand reflexively reaching for the sidearm holstered at his hip. But how do you shoot something in your head?"Define 'Anchor,'" he growled."YOU ARE THE REMNANT
Chapter 10: Dust Spiral
The surface of the planet was hissing with heat mirages and nasty splinters of rust-red stone, broken as if the planet itself had split apart in agony. They'd abandoned the wrecked freighter hours ago—its empty halls still ringing with the faint dying whisper of the logic core. Riven, Soli, and the demure AI Nix now made their way back towards The Vanta, navigating between the fossilized ridges of what once was a mining colony.The wind tasted odd here. It was not dust—it was rust, data rot, and something acrid, as if the air recalled violence.Soli led them, sweeping with a hand-held spiker relay, as Riven had his hand resting on his gun. Nix brought up the rear, its humanoid casing crackling slightly, a stuttering shine as if it wasn't designed to be on the same plane of reality."Still no sign of our tail?"Riven asked.Soli looked over her shoulder. "Nothing on the scanner, but that don't mean they ain't here.""Dustborn?""Maybe. Or maybe they were already on-world."They went an