2025-05-17 15:27:21The 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 map flickered into view: Halvex Prime, spinning in a loop of static and data fragments, coordinates locked, and orbit achieved.
Nix didn’t need words. She communicated through light and motion—shifts in ship temperature, the texture of air pressure in the control room, the rhythm of power cycles. At first, it unnerved him.
But now… it felt familiar.
Like a rhythm he used to dance with in another life.
“Prep for descent,” Riven ordered, tapping the console.
The Vanta shuddered in agreement, then began its long drop toward the broken planet below.
Halvex Prime had once been the jewel of the core worlds. Center of cultural fusion, experimental science, and Interzone diplomacy. Now, it was a graveyard orbiting its own failure. The Veil rupture had torn its surface into fractal shards, with fragments of cities suspended in low-orbit debris fields—skyscrapers turned sideways, frozen oceans shattered mid-wave, fields of warped metal drifting like icebergs.
And then there were the junkstorms.
They were born from the gravitational collapse of failed Veil experiments—microscopic wormholes embedded in ruined infrastructure, spinning like dying stars. When caught in atmospheric drag, these micro-portals tore through ships, buildings, and people indiscriminately, dragging debris across space-time like ribbons in a black wind.
It was into one of these that the Vanta now descended.
The closer they dropped, the worse the turbulence became. The ship’s hull creaked and spat vapor through stress vents. External cameras blinked on and off. Sparks flew from a loose overhead relay. The ship’s AI adjusted angles mid-flight, performing a hundred microscopic course corrections per second.
But the storm was growing.
Chunks of glass, bone, rusted titanium, and data-matter spiraled around them like a school of starving predators. Something vast flickered behind the cloud—something man-made, but bent, as though caught halfway through a dimensional fold.
“Stabilize trajectory,” Riven shouted, gripping the console. “Feed more to the gravity mesh!”
Nix responded with a hum so loud it buzzed through his jaw.
The Vanta’s thrusters ignited full burn, angling away from the collapsing vectors. But the storm refused to release them.
And then—A whisper.
Soft, nearly drowned beneath the sirens and metal moan.
“Riven…”
He froze, it wasn’t in his ears. It was inside his mind.
“...Riven Hale... you left us…”
The voice was melodic, unhurried. Genderless. Inhuman.
He staggered back from the console as another pulse rippled through the ship—this one not from the storm, but from something else. The walls blurred, and the ship around him flickered. He blinked—
—and the bridge was gone.
In its place: a wide, open plain under a sky filled with shattered moons. He stood barefoot on a blackened field where twisted metal trees grew from ash. The air tasted like cold honey and regret. And in the distance, he saw a shape walking toward him—tall, cloaked, moving without moving.
“Who are you?” he called out.
The figure paused, lifted a hand, and pointed at him.
“You are not what you remember. You are the echo of a wound.”
Riven’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
Behind the figure, the sky cracked open. A tear—a jagged split bleeding starlight.
And from it, hundreds of voices screamed his name.
He awoke face-down on the floor of the bridge, blood dripping from his nose.
The ship was still in descent, shaking violently. Nix had rerouted most of the systems, shifting power to inertial dampeners. A faint haze of fire painted the edge of the viewport—atmospheric entry.
“What the hell was that…” Riven gasped, wiping his face.
No reply, of course.
But something in the ship’s rhythm had changed. The light flickers felt… hesitant. Like the AI had seen what he had. Or perhaps she had been there, too.
He crawled back to the pilot’s station and slammed a manual override.
“Lock onto the Halvex Beacon—there was a research station on the equatorial ridge before the rupture. Find me the nearest stable platform.”
A new map unfolded. One zone pinged green: an ancient emergency landing tower, half-buried in crater ice. It was old, probably stripped, but stable.
That would do.
As the Vanta leveled out and adjusted course, Riven leaned against the wall and let himself breathe.
The voice hadn’t been human. But it had known his name. It had spoken it like a curse or a promise.
And the words—"You are the echo of a wound."
It didn’t sound like prophecy.
It sounded like memory.
They landed hard.
The tower had sunk nearly forty feet into the crust since the Collapse. Most of the upper spires were bent backward, and the landing platform was littered with frost-covered debris. Riven disembarked into the cold, his boots crunching down onto what used to be a rooftop garden.
The silence was absolute.
Only the low groan of shifting ice beneath the metal echoed through the canyon of ruin.
He activated a local pulse beacon and waited for response. Nothing.
But on his HUD, a low-frequency energy field pulsed nearby, unstable and artificial.
It was located beneath the tower—some kind of substructure buried under centuries of collapse.
Riven’s heart beat faster.
He didn’t know what he was chasing yet.
But whatever it was...
…it already knew he was coming.
To be continued...
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 14: The Architect's Shadow
The chamber’s lights dissolved into white noise. Riven’s head pounded with every beat, as if the Spiral itself had taken hold and was roaring through his skull. The last image he registered before the world went dark was the architect interface’s translucent hand pressed against his glyph—its crystalline glow pulsing in sync with his fading heartbeat.And then—nothing.He awoke to a sound like bone grinding. A slow mechanical groan echoed around him as he tried to move. His vision swam into focus to reveal curved walls of burnished metal. The room was silent—no Dustborn guards, no council enforcers. Only the hum of failing systems and the dull throb of his own pulse.He tested his limbs. They worked. He sat up, breath shallow and sharp.Soli.Riven turned his head. Light reflected off her still form a few meters away: slumped, unconscious—or worse. He reached her side, heart racing, and gently shook her shoulder.“Soli,” he whispered.Her eyelids fluttered. She groaned, lifting a hand
Chapter 13: Veilborn Reckoning,
The cockpit lights flickered once—then died. Riven’s heartbeat thundered in his ears as the viewport went dark, swallowing Halvex Prime’s glowing horizon like a severed pulse. Outside, the architect-craft—alive, sentient—hovered in total eclipse. All light came from its crystalline veins, which pulsed with slow, deliberate reverence.He swallowed, fear and determination tangling in his chest. The glyph on his shoulder throbbed beneath his skin, each beat a reminder that he had named and awakened something beyond human reckoning. He’d said the code aloud. He’d delivered himself to this moment—and he would not turn away.“Soli,” he whispered, voice coarse. He turned to the passenger seat—empty. She must have left the shuttle again. His heart froze.Then the airlock hissed—and she stepped back inside, helmet removed. Bruises under her eyes glimmered; her expression was fierce. “They escorted me through the outer decks. Stasis pods still active—like a prize exhibit. They know exactly what
Chapter 12: Silent Echoes
The cockpit lights were too dim, the silence too loud. Riven watched Sedna, the red planet of Halvex Prime, drift by like an ancient wound under fractured clouds of ash. Everything out here had been broken once—and never quite healed.He swallowed. His reflection stared back at him: hollow cheeks, eyes weighed down by memory fractures. The glyph branded on his shoulder pulsed faintly beneath his skin, as if waiting for permission to surface again.You are late.The words echoed in his skull, not as memory but as dread. He reached for the console, but his mind recoiled. The station was waiting. And it knew he was coming.“Soli.” He turned. She’d been sleeping against the seat, head tilted, still clothed in dust and dread. Bruises marked her face, hardened with fatigue. Eyes half-open, she rubbed them and touched her side where old scars still throbbed.“Good morning,” she managed, her voice strained but solid.Outside, Sedna pulsed. The planet seemed to breathe beneath the ash storms—p
Chapter 11: Ash Company Memory
The corridor was silent. Too silent.Riven’s heartbeat wasn’t.He stepped out of the Palimpsest’s airlock and into the half-ruined mining compound, his boots echoing on fractured metal. Behind him, Soli wiped blood from her cheek, her breath shaky. Nix remained silent and motionless—its programming apparently frozen by the Dustborn blast.But Riven’s eyes were locked on the shattered horizon.He held the empty case of the datashard in his hand. Whatever had been encoded in that fragment had burned a hole in his mind—a memory of a time he’d never lived. Standing before a living Veil gate. Younger. In full Anchor gear.The shards of his identity were fracturing. The real Riven, the displaced Ashley… who knew anymore?They walked toward the holo-comm array where they’d boarded seconds before. Soli’s hands trembled as she powered up the system. The internal display flickered, half offline. But when it came to life, Riven could see his reflection behind the glare—and the flicker of doubt i
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
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
