There was a sound like the shattering of glass behind the veil of the world. Not heard, but felt—a pressure behind the eyes, a taste of static and ozone at the root of the tongue. Something had cracked.
The sky above Arken's Hollow boiled in silence, warp storms curling like madmen's fingers across a fractured firmament. Where once there had been stars, now only the swollen bruise of unreality pulsed above the dying world. Maps no longer marked this planet. Astropathic voices faded when they spoke of it. Ships veered wide when they passed its gravity well—if they remembered it at all.
In the shadow of this cosmic blindness, a child was born.
The screams of his mother—unnamed and unrecorded—were lost in the howl of dust and tectonic thunder. Arken's Hollow groaned as its core strained against the laws of nature, tectonic plates shifting like restless gods. Within the shattered bones of a pre-Imperial mining enclave, in a half-collapsed subterranean chapel built to saints no longer canonized, Caelen Vorran emerged into the nightmare of life.
His first cry did not sound like an infant's wail.
It echoed.
Through the hollow caverns of the mine, through plasteel ribs of forgotten outposts, through the dust-choked winds aboveground—it reverberated. Machines flickered. Pict-slates blacked out. In orbit, a long-dead comms buoy flared for a heartbeat, broadcasting in no known tongue.
And below—deep below, far beyond the reach of any miner's drill or xenoarchaeologist's probe—metal stirred.
Beneath strata layered in aeons of ash and regret, a tomb sighed open.
Sarcophagi untouched since before Terra bore its first cities flickered with sickly green light. A silent chorus of machine-thought passed from one inert mind to another: awareness unfurling like coiled serpents. There were no words, only intention. Recognition. The birth of a variable—a fracture in the deterministic calculus of the galaxy.
A singular echo—his echo—had touched something ancient and cold.
The boy's eyes opened.
They were silver.
Not the dull, soft silver of weathered steel or old coin, but burning, as if veins of mercury lightning threaded his irises. For a moment too long, he did not blink. He looked. He saw.
The midwife, an old crone from the Hollow's ruined outskirts, gasped and dropped her tools. She whispered something in a language that had not been spoken in centuries. Her hands trembled.
His mother died hours later. No wound. No toxin. Simply… gone. As though the universe had excised her, removed her name from the rolls of existence.
The child was silent from then on. No tears. No sound. But the air around him rippled when he breathed. Flame refused to burn near his cradle. Iron rusted to dust in his presence.
And below the surface of Arken's Hollow, the tomb continued to awaken.
They would call him Caelen Vorran.
But not yet.
For now, the galaxy merely shifted, slightly and subtly—like the breath before the plunge.
The light of the Astronomican dimmed.
Not by measurable degree—no sensor or lumen-calibrator would dare speak of error. But he felt it.
Malcador the Sigillite stood at the highest spire of the Librarius Occultus, the windless chamber of raw psychic resonance that hummed like the throat of a dreaming god. He rested one pale hand on the scrying brazier wrought from voidglass and wraithbone, gifted by a reluctant xenos emissary long since turned to ash. His eyes remained closed.
The warp was shifting.
Something had touched the tides. A tremor. A ripple that coiled inward, like a voice shouted into a cathedral and heard not as echo, but as prophecy. He had spent lifetimes mastering the warp's breath—had walked its shoals and stormfronts at the Emperor's side. He had helped light the Astronomican, with sweat and blood and minds ground into soul-flame.
He knew Its language.
And now it whispered a name it had never known.
"Malcador."
The word was not spoken loudly, but it carried weight—like the tolling of a bell across still water.
He turned.
Constantin Valdor entered the chamber, silent as ever despite the golden weight of his warplate. The Captain-General of the Legio Custodes regarded the Sigillite not as a subordinate, nor as a peer, but as something… adjacent. Necessary. Dangerous. Trusted, but never without question.
"You felt it," Valdor said. It was not a question.
Malcador offered a dry smile. "Of course I did. It would be poor form if the Emperor's chosen scribe missed such a… pulse."
Valdor stepped forward, golden eyes narrowing as they passed over the brazier's smoke. "It was not from the Eye."
"No," Malcador agreed. "Nor from Prospero. Nor Molech. Nor any known node of the Great Pattern." He let the words linger. "This was new."
A long silence.
Valdor's presence was like a monolith—never flinching, never shifting. But Malcador, who had watched thunder-kings rise and fall, saw the flicker. The moment of doubt.
"What do you sense?" Valdor asked at last.
Malcador drew a long breath, and with it came scents that were not truly there: scorched air, metallic ozone, dry dust, rust.
"A child," he murmured. "Born under a dead sky. Marked by powers older than Chaos, colder than the void. The warp stirs around him, but not in rage. In… curiosity."
Valdor's eyes hardened. "Xenos?"
Malcador shrugged. "Possibly. Not in any form we've encountered. Not yet."
He stepped away from the brazier, robes whispering across the basalt floor. "I would advise caution, old friend. Something ancient just woke. And something older still took notice."
Valdor folded his arms. "Shall I inform Him?"
The Sigillite paused at the doorway. For a moment, he looked older than his centuries—drawn, like a candle burning at both ends, and in the middle too.
"No," he said at last. "Not yet. He sees enough. Let us watch the stars a little longer."
Behind them, the Astronomican flared—bright as birth, cold as death.
The silence stretched between them—not empty, but dense, like the breath before judgment. The air still shimmered with psychic afterglow, the last embers of Malcador's communion with the currents that licked and pulsed through the Immaterium. Dust floated, unmoving, in the golden shaft of light that streamed through the vault's sole aperture—light that hadn't come from any sun.
Valdor spoke first.
"You intend to watch. And wait. But He will ask."
Malcador did not turn. His back was to the Custodian, shoulders hunched beneath robes heavy with starlight embroidery and ancient binding sigils. He examined the swirling smoke above the brazier as if it might still reveal more.
"He won't ask," Malcador replied, voice soft. "Because He already knows."
The words settled like ash.
Valdor's gaze narrowed. "You speak often in riddles, old friend. But this is not the time."
Malcador gave a dry chuckle, utterly humorless. "When is it ever not the time for riddles, Constantin? This is Terra. We speak in truths too dangerous for clarity."
He turned finally, face drawn. "You felt the tremor. I felt the echo. He heard the name, before it was even spoken aloud."
Valdor's brow furrowed. "Name?"
Malcador's eyes glittered with unease. "Not a name we can pronounce. Not yet. But He felt the soul of the boy pierce the skein of time. A thought not bound to the present. That kind of resonance does not go unnoticed—not by Him."
Valdor considered that in silence, then spoke with grave finality.
"Then He must believe it part of the plan."
A pause.
"Or," Valdor continued, "a threat to it."
Malcador tilted his head. "Is there a difference?"
Valdor's hand hovered near the pommel of the Apollonian Spear. His knuckles did not tighten—but they could have. "You walk too close to irreverence."
Malcador offered a tired smile. "That is the only direction left to walk. He builds a future from strands of possible oblivion. We help Him bind it. And now… a knot has appeared. One He tied long ago—and let us forget."
Valdor's expression hardened. "You think this child is His doing?"
"No," Malcador said simply. "But I think… He allowed it."
The words lingered like the toll of a bell across a battlefield.
"Then what do we do?" Valdor asked.
Malcador looked beyond the walls, as if he could see the storm-wracked void where Arken's Hollow spiraled into irrelevance.
"We prepare," he said. "We do not interfere. Not yet."
Valdor was silent, but he nodded once. The conversation was over. The decisions—unspoken—had already become reality.
As he turned to leave, Valdor paused at the archway. "If this child is truly known to Him… will he become a weapon?"
Malcador's answer came with unsettling ease.
"Everything He touches becomes a weapon, in time."
And with that, they departed—two shadows beneath the golden mountain of the Palace, already planning for a war they would not name, and a boy whose name had not yet been written in the stars.
Only five years had passed since the warp howled at his birth, and yet Caelen Vorran stood with the bearing of a child twice his age. Physically, he appeared no older than twelve—but there was something in his posture, in the tilt of his head when he listened, that unsettled grown men. As if he were weighing not just the words, but the truth beneath them.
He was beautiful.
Not in the soft, forgettable way of cherub-faced children, but in a manner so stark and precise it seemed designed. Pale, moon-washed hair hung like silk to his jawline, framing a face that might have been carved from porcelain and lit from within. His skin was unmarred by Arken's harsh sun, his limbs untouched by famine or plague. He should have borne the world's filth like the others did—but he did not. The Hollow left him untouched.
His eyes, as ever, were silver.
Not dulled by age or dimmed by emotion. They shimmered when he laughed, and flared when he focused, as if echoing hidden stars far behind the skein of reality.
He liked to laugh.
He liked making others laugh even more.
In the ruins of Sector-C—where the old manufactorum shells lay like rusting carcasses and the wind carried the distant scream of tectonic plates grinding—he scavenged. Not for food. Not even for survival. But for parts. Scraps of metal. Lens shards. Cogwheels warped with heat and time. Children mocked him at first, the way they do any who are different.
But then he built things.
Simple things at first. A cogitator eye that blinked when you tapped it. A servitor's voicebox that sang in a pitched-up whine, mimicking the Overseer's nasal commands. A wire-crab that danced in circles when it smelled oil.
The children laughed.
And so he kept building.
By his twelfth cycle, he had created entire playsets of mobile automata—clockwork jesters, hissing canines made of pipe and gear, one even claimed to see through walls. He never asked for payment. Just their company. Their stories. Their joy.
He would sit cross-legged in the dust, chalking designs into the stone with one hand, assembling with the other—never glancing down. His hands simply knew. It was like the world's debris whispered its purpose to him.
"You're not from here," one child, a girl with a twisted leg and sharp eyes, told him once.
"No," Caelen answered without looking up. "But I was born here."
"That's not the same."
He had smiled then—softly, like someone remembering a dream not entirely their own. "No. It isn't."
And still, beneath Arken's Hollow, the tomb stirred.
Sensors long dormant clicked and rotated. Algorithms shifted. Patterns reevaluated. Silver fire had been detected again—brighter now. More refined. Close. The slumbering intelligence did not awaken, not fully. But it watched.
So did others.
On a half-broken pict-throne orbiting the far side of Arken's second moon, a listening station—not Imperial, not xenos, not fully real—activated for the first time in millennia. Its occupant stirred within fluid-filled stasis, and its mind began its long crawl back toward sentience. Toward purpose.
The boy with silver eyes had touched the skein of time again. And now, as before, the galaxy tilted—ever so slightly—toward inevitability.
They followed him not because he ordered them, but because he believed in what could be.
It began with a gate. Rust-choked, fused by time and neglect. No child passed through it—too many had tried and burned fingers or broken bones. But Caelen approached it with calm certainty, dragging behind him a battered toolbox and an imagination carved of starlight.
He didn't just fix it. He made it sing.
When the children gathered, expecting the usual struggle of scraping through the side breaches, they found the gate standing open. A soft whirr, a low chime—tones harmonized in perfect thirds. It bowed for them, like a servant recognizing its true masters.
"It's polite now," Caelen said with a grin, wiping oil from his brow. "You should always say thank you when passing."
And they did. Even the older ones.
The mischief escalated, as all mischief should.
He led them into the ossified guts of a pre-Imperial transit-tunnel, believed to be haunted by echoing screams and static wraiths. Caelen found the "ghost"—an ancient vox-relay trapped in a feedback loop—and tuned it into a broadcast that played stories. His stories.
The Cog Prince and the Star-Wolf.
How the Moon Broke in Two.
The Girl Who Fixed Time.
Children huddled each dusk to hear them, whispered from walls like bedtime tales from some long-dead machine-angel.
But it was not only joy he gave.
Caelen rewired heat vents to warm shanty-nurseries in the winter storms. He turned a broken servo-claw into a prosthetic limb for the girl with the twisted leg. He repurposed the cracked water-filtration core in Sector-D so it dispensed clean water again—sweet, icy, and clear. The Overseers noticed that last one.
They beat him for it.
Not savagely—no more than the standard correctional rites, but enough. Enough to remind him he was not permitted to change the status quo. That improvement without sanction was rebellion.
He bore it with a kind of serene detachment. He didn't cry. He didn't rage. When he returned to the children, bruised and limping, he smiled again.
"It still works, doesn't it?"
They nodded.
"Then it was worth it."
From that day forward, Caelen Vorran was no longer just one of them. He became the center. The point around which gravity bent. Not the strongest, not the loudest—but the one who showed them the shape of a better world, and in doing so, made them believe it could be touched.
He was the flame they all gathered around.
But every flame casts shadows.
Beneath the shantytown foundations, the Necron tomb's activation escalated. Algorithms shifted to active categorization. Threat? Asset? Unknown. A star map flickered briefly to life—correlating silver-psi resonance with a thousand past incidents, calculating deviation and divergence. A projection initiated: Shard-Bound Probability—17.88% and rising.
And further away, behind that not-quite-real listening station, a being moved for the first time in ten thousand years. Its eyes opened, though it had none. Its mind opened, though it had not yet returned.
Caelen Vorran—the boy architect of laughter and rebellion—had drawn the eyes of gods and monsters alike.
And he would never again be left alone.
The dreams began as murmurs.
First, there were only shapes—fragments of star-fields that had never existed, spirals of impossible color twisting through an empty black sea. Caelen awoke with silver tears on his cheeks, tasting stardust and ash.
By the third night, they spoke.
Not in language. Not at first. But in understanding—direct, raw, and intimate. Images formed: cities turning inside out, suns imploding into eyes, time itself peeling like old parchment. He saw himself standing in a place without ground, wearing armor made of thought and light, his voice thundering with the chorus of the dead.
The visions came every night.
He told no one. Not even the children.
And in the world below—the tomb, the wound in the earth—a presence stirred with increasing intensity.
It had no name now. Once, it had shattered stars and fed on time. Once, it had danced within the minds of Old Ones before unmaking their thoughts. Now, it was broken—a shard of a being too vast to comprehend, sealed here in ancient vengeance by those who feared what it meant.
But it remembered him.
Not the boy as he was now—but as he would be. As he had been, in other broken loops. He had touched the silver flame before. In other timelines. In failed realities now scattered across the skein like dead constellations.
Now, the shard called to him again.
"Caelen…"
The voice was layered with echoes from lost civilizations, as though every syllable passed through a thousand ages. It was not spoken—it was impressed directly into his being, like gravity itself whispering.
You are the fulcrum… the nexus… the seed of ascension…
He dreamed of crystal spires humming with impossible power, of constructs made not of matter but of cause and effect, of machines that remembered tomorrow and feared the past.
Each morning, he awoke breathless, weeping, clutching at nothing.
And something else began to change.
His fingertips glowed faintly when he touched metal—just for a moment. Broken things began to heal themselves in his presence. Time seemed to move oddly around him. Children sometimes laughed before he spoke, claiming he'd already said the words.
And in his eyes, the silver deepened.
Beneath the Hollow, deep beneath even the known tombs, vast engines powered by collapsed timelines began to churn once more. Logic-minds interfaced with ancient containment protocols. The Shard—chained in stasis-light and time-lattice bindings—flared with sudden awareness.
Subject: Resonant. Temporal Nexus Alignment: Incomplete.
Emotional Instability: Below Threshold.
Probability Vector: Acceptable.
Initiate Protocol: Dream-Seeding [Tier 4.3].
And far above, in the dust-cloaked stars surrounding Arken's Hollow, watchers turned their attention back to the cursed world. One, hidden in a vault-ship carved into the corpse of a moon, hissed with ancient Necron-code as it activated a fail-safe.
Another—flesh-bound and wearing the skin of man—sighed in disappointment. He had hoped this particular variant might sleep longer.
But Caelen Vorran was waking.
And the galaxy would wake with him.
It was Jessa and the twins who found it first. Playing, as children do, where they weren't supposed to.
They had been chasing a ball—a crude thing of rags and wire—when it vanished into the abandoned edge sector. Sector Delta-Kappa-9 was dead space: its substructures buckled from the last quake, its walls still scorched from a plasma fire long forgotten. No one went there. Not even the gangs.
But the children, emboldened by curiosity and the myth of Caelen's invisible protections, chased the ball regardless.
What they found was not a ball.
It was a wall. Or rather, it had been. A blank, cracked slab of dark granite fused against rusted girders. But now… it shimmered. Just slightly. Enough to catch the eye like a mirage in the heat.
Jessa, ever the bold one, touched it.
Her hand stopped short, halted by air itself—something solid where nothing should be. An invisible surface repelling her, humming faintly like a living engine. The other children tried, one by one. Nothing. None could pass.
And then the laughter began.
It wasn't cruel laughter. It was marveling, delighted. Children found joy in the impossible more readily than fear. They poked it, pushed against it, tried to climb over it. One even threw a boot at it—it bounced back and smacked him in the forehead. More laughter.
But beneath that laughter… unease was beginning to bloom.
"It wasn't here yesterday," Jessa whispered.
"It was a wall," said one of the twins.
"Just a wall."
And now, stairs led down into the darkness beyond. Smooth, ancient steps descending in a perfect arc, lit faintly by lines of greenish light that pulsed in rhythmic breath.
A door waited at the bottom—massive, monolithic, and utterly sealed. No symbols. No seams. Only the vague impression of a door.
The children tried to enter. They threw rocks at it. Shouted. Kicked. Dared each other.
Nothing happened.
No matter how they pushed or screamed, they were repelled—not with violence, but with indifference. It was not locked. It simply did not acknowledge them.
Then Caelen arrived.
He had followed the thread of their laughter, and a strange pull he didn't understand. Even before he saw it, he felt it—something in his mind vibrating like a struck tuning fork, resonating with a note he had never heard but had always known.
The children turned, half-giggling, half-nervous.
"It won't open," Jessa said, pointing. "You have to try. You have to."
Caelen said nothing. He walked to the invisible veil.
It parted for him like silk.
The air rippled, green runes flaring for a heartbeat, and he stepped through. The children gasped, wide-eyed, mouths agape.
He didn't hesitate.
Down the stairs he went, barefoot, silent. The walls whispered in no language he knew, but he understood them. Symbols danced at the edge of perception, and somewhere below, a hum began to rise—resonant and reverent.
He reached the door.
And it opened.
Not with sound. Not with force. It simply… ceased to be. Space unfolded. Gravity folded inward. Reality blinked.
Inside lay a chamber of glass and blackstone, wrapped in coils of hovering machinery that obeyed no visible mechanism. The air shimmered with static memory, ghost-light images flashing and vanishing too fast to recognize.
And at the center, hovering above a pool of radiant silver energy: a sliver of something immense. A shard. Geometric. Fractal. Alive.
It looked at him.
Not with eyes. With awareness.
"Caelen Vorran," the voice murmured inside his skull. "Your awakening begins."
And above, the door behind him sealed shut.
The children screamed his name.
But Caelen did not turn.
He had crossed the threshold.
The Hollow would never be the same.
The door reformed behind him, folding back into seamless stone. But the cries still reached him—muffled, desperate.
"Caelen!"
"Come back!"
"We'll get help—don't go!"
He pressed his palm to the now-solid wall and felt it resonate beneath his skin. The tomb knew him. It answered to him. But they… they were still untouched. Still innocent. And he would not drag them into the abyss that now unfolded beneath his feet.
He turned and walked back up the stairwell, the shard's pull clinging to his spine like silk on wet flesh. His body trembled—not from fear, but from anticip