Oblivion's Edge: Voidborn

Aēlion's POV.

The mist clings to my skin like memory, thick, cold, and full of ghosts. My feet hammer the cracked earth, muscles screaming, lungs burning with the sour air of this ruined world. Behind me, it howls. Not with voice or breath, but with that deep, pulsing drone that infects the air itself, an alien vibration that rattles my bones.

Humanoids. Not one, many. I don't dare look back.

My name is °Aēlion-197. At least, that's what they called me in the Edge. In this place, this broken, ash-swept wasteland of what Earth used to be, names feel meaningless. It's the year 2100 am running from what seems to be a mindless humanoid. I'm exhausted, drained, dehydrated, hungry even but I can't stop now. The survival of my entire civilization rests on my unworthy shoulders.

I vault over a collapsed wall, nearly twisting my ankle on the descent. Blood oozes from my shoulder where one of the creatures grazed me earlier. The wound pulses with strange heat, as though something inside it is alive. I don't have time to worry about infection, not now.

The city around me is a corpse, skeletal towers piercing the fog like gravestones. I remember learning about this place in the archives, New San Diego, once a symbol of human perseverance. Now? Just rubble and ghost echoes.

"Never stray past the mirrors," they told us in the Edge.

"The world beyond is poison."

Lies.

All of it.

I learned the whole truth the moment the illusion shattered, and I saw her.

Sira.

She's half-human, half-alien. Impossible. Beautiful.

It was her hands that shattered the walls of my cell. Her voice that said, "You were never meant to die in a cage."

Now I run because of her. Now I run with purpose. I run because of the people still being lied and manipulated in the Edge.

The humanoids draw closer. Their limbs move in jerks, as though manipulated by strings. Faces blank. Eyes glowing a faint violet.

Not truly alive.

Not truly dead.

Just... obedient.

Like we were.

The Edge taught us that safety lies in ignorance. That silence is survival. They fed us filtered knowledge, showed us synthetic skies, programmed our dreams. We lived in a world reflected polished, perfect, and utterly false.

I trip over something half-buried in the dirt. A child's skeleton, tiny fingers curled around a stuffed synth-toy now eaten by mold. I keep running.

A whir sounds from the left. I pivot. Too late.

One of them drops in front of me. Tall. Masked. Its body flickers with blue veins under metal-like skin. It tilts its head at me, not curious, just calculating. Then it charges.

I leap sideways, barely avoiding the impact, and roll behind a rusted car husk. My breathing is ragged. I can't keep this up much longer. But I have to. There's too much at stake.

Because the war is coming. No... the war has already begun.

I close my eyes for half a heartbeat. The memories flood in like poison gas.

The Edge, pristine and cold. Classrooms of children with blank stares reciting phrases like drones. "The aliens are beasts. We must obey the Wardens. We must protect the Edge for the sake of humanity."

I believed it all. I was one of them. A perfect cog.

Until I started asking questions.

Until I stopped obeying the rules.

Until I met Sira.

Her eyes glowed with a different kind of light not the pale mimicry of the Edge, but something wild. Something real. She showed me ruins beneath the glass.

A truth buried in lies.

A world fractured in two.

I snap back to the present as rubble shifts near my hiding place. The humanoid is scanning. I can hear its pulse-beat, low and synthetic.

My hand fumbles for the shard of metal I stole earlier, a jagged blade no longer than my forearm. It won't kill it. But it might buy me seconds.

A sudden flash-movement.

I spring up, swing the blade. Metal meets flesh. Sparks. The humanoid recoils, but another takes its place.

I run.

Through alleyways choked with vines and ash. Over bridges barely holding together. My destination burns in my mind like fire: the EDGE.

I hear a voice in my head. Not my own. It was mom's.

"They fear your truth more than their lies. That is your weapon, Aēlion. Wield it."

The mist grows thicker. I can no longer see my hands. Only the glow of the humanoids behind me, closing in. But I don't stop. Because I remember something else too from my time in the Virelia.

It was from one of the hidden data Theri helped me uncover.

It said:

"The day the sky cracked.

Fifty years ago. The Earth fell not with explosions, but with silence. The aliens arrived not as conquerors, but as architects of illusion. Who are these aliens? Where are they from?

Those were questions plundered across decades.

Knowing humans we broke a deal with the alien invaders, our government would give out humans to become used for their mindless experiment in exchange for their advanced technology.

This brought about the economic growths beyond what we thought was possible but it doesn't last. We wanted more, more power more technology more everything.

That's when shit went really wrong"

I stumble onto a highway split in half by time. Far below, a river of black fog churns. Above, the stars blink through cracks in the ceiling of clouds. There's beauty in this broken place.

I don't know how much further I can run.

But I will run.

Not just for me.

For the ones still trapped in the illusion.

For the girl who saved my life.

For mother.

For the reckoning yet to come.

...