The wind didn't carry sound on Khar-Tor.
It carried dust. Dry. Bitter. Packed with ash and powdered rust. It scraped across the skin like sandpaper left out in the sun. But this wind… this wind carried smoke.
Dren Mako ran through it, mouth covered, lungs burning.
Behind him, the scavenger outpost known as Barrow's Edge bled fire into the night. Black smoke curled into the copper sky, where Khar-Tor's dying sun dipped like a wound behind the dunes. The raiders had come just before dusk—riding cracked-crawler rigs and bone-welded sand skiffs, screaming through the gaps in the shield wall. They didn't want trade. They didn't want tech.
They just wanted the last things worth killing for.
Dren hadn't looked back. Not when the sirens failed. Not when the boltdrivers started screaming. Not even when he saw Lassit, the boy who always brought him scrap wiring for dried fruit, get split open like a sack of meat.
He just ran.
His boots punched through the thin crust of the desert floor, kicking up sparks and grit. His breath came in sharp bursts through the breather cloth around his mouth, already crusted over with particulate ash. Every part of his body screamed for rest. He didn't give it permission.
A sudden roar behind him—the engine-scream of a skiff, closing fast.
He dove off the trail, tumbled down a slope, and slammed into the curve of a dry basin filled with half-buried metal. His shoulder caught on a jag of old steel. Blood ran. He ignored it.
Above him, the skiff hovered for a moment. Then it screamed past, chasing shadows to the west.
Dren waited. Counted fifteen breaths.
Then he stood, clutching his side, and looked around. This wasn't any basin. This was one of the forbidden zones—a crater left behind after a deep-core drill struck something it shouldn't. All across Khar-Tor, they whispered about what was buried here.
They said this was where the metal gods fell.
Dren didn't care about gods.
He needed a hole to crawl into. And there, ahead—half-swallowed by dust, bent sideways and scorched—was a breach in a massive metallic husk. An ancient ship? A facility? He couldn't tell. He didn't care.
He moved toward it, limping slightly, and disappeared into the wreck.
The heat faded as Dren stepped through the breach.
Inside, the world changed.
Gone was the dry rasp of the wind, the choking reek of fire and ash. In here, the air was dead but still—sealed long ago behind warped metal and sand-packed seams. The only sound was his own breathing, faint through the breather cloth, and the soft tick… tick… tick of his boots against something that wasn't quite metal. Not anymore.
The passage sloped downward into dark.
Dren raised a small light from his belt—cobbled together from scrap and solar charge. It cast a flickering cone across walls that gleamed too smooth, too unbroken. No rivets. No seams. This wasn't human construction. Not even the advanced settlers who left decades ago could've made walls like this.
He moved slowly, favoring his wounded side. Blood had dried across his ribs, forming a dark smear beneath his cloak. But he didn't stop. He couldn't afford to.
A body lay ahead. Half-slumped against a curved column, its skin mummified, fingers still clutched around a broken tool.
Dren knelt beside it. Scavenger. Rust-red armor. No insignia. No name.
He pried the pack from the corpse's shoulder and dug through it: dried ration squares, cracked filter tablets, one empty water canister, and a small datakey—dead. He pocketed it anyway. Sometimes dead things talked if you asked the right machines.
He stood.
Around him, the interior curved like a spinal tunnel—lined with faint ridges that pulsed in his peripheral vision, though his light showed no movement. The ship was dead. That was the story. Everyone knew it. That's why the old scavenger crews avoided the Grave-Sand Craters. Ships that didn't die clean were cursed.
He didn't believe in curses.
But he believed in last chances.
The tunnel led to a wider chamber. Dren stepped into it, boots clicking onto a half-submerged floor littered with sand and broken cables. Overhead, thin, glowing veins of dull-blue light trailed like frost across the ceiling.
They pulsed.
Once.
He froze.
Nothing else moved. No sound. No hum. But the hairs on his arms stood up. The air here was charged. Not hot—but dense. Like a lightning storm about to break.
He kept going.
Two more dead scavengers lay ahead—one with half his helmet melted into his skull, the other collapsed beside what looked like a control pedestal. Dren approached the latter and brushed off the dust.
Symbols covered it. Sharp. Angular. Alien. Not just a language—a logic system. Something alive once. Now dormant.
He tapped it. No reaction.
He ran a charge spike from his belt into a visible port. Nothing.
He leaned in.
Then he felt it: a hum under the floor. Faint. In his teeth, not ears.
There was something beneath this room.
He searched the edge of the chamber and found a sloped access shaft—half-collapsed, choked with sand. Most would've turned back. Dren didn't hesitate. He slid down on his hip, carving a path through the slope, and dropped into a lower deck.
This room was different.
No bodies. No signs of previous scavenging. The air smelled cold—not in temperature, but in memory. As if no breath had passed through here in centuries. The light from his belt lamp caught on something up ahead, half-walled behind crystalline growths.
A sealed chamber.
Black crystal veined the entrance like frozen lightning strikes. Whatever had once sealed it had cracked from the inside. He approached slowly. The crystal fizzed slightly beneath his touch.
He reached for the breach—
And heard something behind the walls.
A pulse.
…thm…
Not a sound. A feeling. Not his heartbeat. Not the wind.
Something ancient.
The crystal pulsed once more as Dren stepped forward—faint, like dying breath under glass.
He moved slow, careful not to disturb anything unstable. The walls here didn't just contain lightning. They looked like they'd been burned through by it, veins of black glass spiderwebbed outward from a central explosion point. The structure beyond wasn't built for people.
It was built to protect whatever lay inside.
Dren reached the edge of the crystalline breach and pressed his palm against the fused metal just beyond it. It was cold. Not the chill of dead air, but something deeper. Dead silence. He felt the pressure settle in behind his ribs—an almost psychic gravity, like being watched by a room that had never known light.
The moment his skin touched that surface, his breath caught.
The pulse came again.
Thm.
This time, it echoed inside him.
He stepped through the narrow opening, the glassy shards hissing beneath his boots, and emerged into a chamber no scavenger had ever seen.
The walls weren't made of panels or plating. They were seamless, glowing in the thinnest lines—barely visible veins of cold blue light etched like circuitry along the black interior. In the center stood a pedestal, round and low, and resting atop it: a core.
No bigger than his fist. Floating. Turning slowly.
It pulsed again.
Thm. Thm.
The light was dull. Weak. But alive.
He didn't move right away. He just stared. Every breath scraped against his ribs like his body knew—this wasn't for him. This wasn't meant to be found. Whatever this place was, it had outlived everything above it—people, cities, even sunlight. Khar-Tor's storms hadn't broken it. Time hadn't corroded it.
But something had nearly killed the thing in the center.
He circled the pedestal, examining the scars along the floor: char lines, spidered fractures. At one point, the chamber had been burned out from within. Yet the core survived.
And it was looking at him.
Dren didn't know how he knew that. There were no eyes. No motion. But still—he felt it. Not like a voice in his head. Not like a god's whisper. Just… focus. The same focus he gave to enemies before a kill.
The same weight he felt behind his eyes when something was about to strike.
He lowered to one knee and studied it closer.
The outer casing of the core looked metallic, but it wasn't reflecting light like metal should. It drank it. The center of it—some rotating geometric fragment—spun without moving, a contradiction his brain refused to resolve. Every now and then, a faint spark crackled off its edge.
Lightning.
He reached for it.
He shouldn't have.
The moment his fingers brushed the surface, everything exploded.
Not outward. Not like a bomb. But inward. As if his entire body had been reversed. Sucked into itself. Nerves screaming. Muscles locking. His back arched so violently he slammed onto the floor, mouth open in a silent roar.
Lightning flooded through him.
White lines seared across his skin, carving down his arms, through his spine, into the roots of his teeth. His vision filled with strobing light—images, not his own:
• A sky full of dead stars
• A fleet of black ships burning in a spiral around a collapsing sun
• A voice without a mouth saying: "LAST COMMAND RECEIVED"
• Silence
Dren tried to scream, but his body wasn't responding. Every nerve was alight, but not melting—rebuilding. The core didn't just discharge—it rewrote. His heartbeat stuttered, then realigned to a rhythm he didn't recognize. The pain wasn't pain anymore. It was data.
And then the floor disappeared.
He couldn't see. Couldn't move. But he felt it—the chamber around him shifting. Adapting. The air warped. A hum rose beneath the skin of the world. His breath hitched.
The core had entered him.
No. Bonded.
Something ancient. Something smart. Something alone for a long, long time… and it had chosen him not because he was worthy—
—but because he was available.
The light snapped off.
Silence.
Dren lay still on the floor, limbs twitching, veins faintly glowing like silver filament beneath the skin. A small arc of electricity jumped between two fingers. His heart beat once—slow and hard—and when it did, the lights embedded in the walls flickered on.
They responded to him.
The ship responded to him.
He wasn't a scavenger anymore.
He wasn't chosen.
But now he was something else.
Something sharp. Something fast.
Something alive with voltage.
He opened his eyes.
They weren't just pale gray anymore.
They glowed.