A profound exhaustion settled into Roewi’s bones, a weariness that no amount of rest could cure. It was the fatigue of a man trying to hold back the tide with his hands. The revelation of the Crown’s true nature had not granted him power; it had multiplied his responsibility a thousandfold. Every flickering signal on the Sanctuary Network was no longer just a plea for help, but a defiant cry in the face of cosmic annihilation. And he was the only one who could hear them all.He stood in the Heart, his eyes closed, his consciousness splintered across a dozen star systems. In one moment, he was a farmer on a dust-blown moon, using a whisper of the Orb of Transmutation to coax a single, hardy grain to sprout in irradiated soil. In the next, he was a doctor on a plague ship, guiding the Orb of Foundation to affirm the stability of a failing heart. In a third, he was a silent witness to a pirate raid, using the Orb of Unity to show the attackers a vision of the families waiting for them ba

The Chronos Garrison hung in the void, a fortress of sharp angles and unyielding logic. Within its command center, the air was as sterile and cold as the equations that governed it. Ereun Solas watched the tactical displays, his gloved hands resting on the console. His focus was absolute, his entire being dedicated to the perfect, recursive algorithms of his defense grid. He had calculated every variable, from the recharge rates of his plasma lances to the psychological breaking point of a potential boarding party. The Garrison was a masterpiece of predictable order.Which was why the arrival of the Fractured Crown’s armada was so deeply… illogical.There was no declaration of war. No hailing frequency. One moment, there was empty space. The next, the fleet was simply there. The bio-augmented ships, their nacreous hulls shimmering with soft, internal light, moved with a silence that was more unnerving than any war cry. They didn't assume a standard attack formation. They simply arrang

Silence, thick and heavy as a shroud, had fallen over the Chronos Garrison’s command center. It was not the sterile quiet of efficiency, but the stunned hush that follows a cataclysm. The air reeked of ionized metal, vented coolant, and the faint, sweet odor of psychic burnout. Around them, the Garrison was a corpse, its spine severed. Consoles spat sparks, and the few crew members who had resisted assimilation now moved like ghosts through the ruin, their eyes hollow with the memory of the golden light that had nearly swallowed them whole.In the center of the devastation, the three of them formed a tense, unstable geometry.Roewi Verdent leaned against the central tactical table, his body a map of exhaustion. The silver filigree beneath his skin was a dull grey, its light nearly extinguished. His intervention had been a Hail Mary pass of the soul, and the cost was written in the tremor of his hands and the blood dried beneath his nose.Across from him, Ereun Solas stood rigid, his b

Myra’s workshop was a sanctuary of organized chaos, a stark contrast to the psychic storm raging in Roewi. Schematics glowed on every flat surface, and the air hummed with the energy of half-a-dozen active terminals, all sifting through the mountains of data Kaira had pirated from the Crown’s assault on the Garrison. The rest of Haven slept, but for Myra, sleep was a luxury they could no longer afford. The flicker in Roewi’s eyes, the way the very air around him sometimes seemed to crystallize with unspoken arguments, it was a code she was desperate to break. She was cross-referencing everything: Division Zero’s declassified archives, the Ghost’s fragmentary logs from the Starseed, even the esoteric cosmological theories the system historians had provided. She was looking for a pattern, a ghost in the machine of history itself. “It doesn’t make sense,” she muttered to the empty room, pushing a stray lock of hair from her face. “The Orbs are pre-Collapse tech. Vextor is a post-Collap

The silence in the Starseed’s cockpit was a tomb. The grey sphere of Atheria hung in the viewport, not as a planet, but as a void in the starfield, a scar on reality itself. Roewi Verdent did not move. He did not breathe. He was a statue of grief and rage, and the dam holding back the tempest within him had shattered.The voices were gone. Not silenced, but consumed.The Foundation’s desire for stasis, the Transmutation’s lust for chaos, the Unity’s yearning for oneness, they were not arguments anymore. They were fuel. The ancient, grieving consciousness of Elara-Vextor, the ghost in his machine, had seen the echo of its own death in Atheria’s erasure. That memory of personal loss, multiplied by eight million, had been the final catalyst.A synaptic bridge snapped into place deep within Roewi’s psyche. The moderator was gone. The partition between host and passenger dissolved.His eyes opened.They were no longer the warm, conflicted eyes of the boy from Nexus. They were cold, quicksi