Pain was the first thing he remembered.
Not the pain of the body—it was beyond that. This was a wiring pain, like his nerves had been unwound and rethreaded with something sharp and humming. Every breath scraped. Every muscle felt stretched over live wire.
Dren Mako woke to the sound of nothing.
No wind. No sand. No screaming metal or storm-dust dragging across dead hulls.
Just… stillness.
And the steady, rhythmic pulse of something deep beneath the floor.
Thm. Thm.
His eyes opened slowly. The world above him pulsed with dull cobalt light, stitched in perfect lines across a black ceiling that had no edges. He didn't recognize the room.
Then again, he wasn't sure he recognized himself.
He sat up with a grunt, cloak half-torn and skin soaked in sweat. The chamber around him was familiar now—he'd seen the walls before, the hollow shapes, the blood-stained scavenger gear. But something was different.
It was cleaner. Brighter. Whole.
And the pedestal that once held the core… was empty.
He looked at his hands.
His veins glowed faintly. Not bright. Not hot. But like filament wires just under the skin.
His fingertips sparked when he flexed.
A shiver ran down his spine.
He stood—unsteady at first—and took in the room. The dust on the floor was gone. Burn marks erased. The air tasted filtered and cold.
The ship had repaired itself.
Or… it had repaired enough.
Dren staggered toward the chamber exit, passing glowing conduits that now pulsed in time with his footsteps. The hum grew louder with every breath. The walls were watching. Not eyes, not AI screens—just awareness. The kind of attention a storm gives before it hits.
He reached a central corridor—formerly dark and dead, now alive with flowing light. In the distance, a stairwell led upward. Something tugged at his chest, as if his lungs remembered wind and wanted to chase it.
He climbed.
Each level showed change—walls that had reformed, systems blinking quietly, scaffolds that retracted when he passed. The ship wasn't just recovering.
It was moving.
He stumbled into the old bridge chamber and stopped cold.
The viewport, once sealed in rust and sand, now opened wide. And outside—
He froze.
The sky was black. But it was space-black. Star-black.
The wreck had risen.
Outside, Khar-Tor's horizon curved in the distance, burned orange under the thin atmosphere. The dust storms that once ruled the planet swirled far below, beneath the ship.
Dren stumbled forward, leaning against the glass.
He wasn't in a grave anymore.
"Command response acknowledged."
The voice wasn't spoken. It thrummed in the walls. Low. Mechanical. Genderless. Not like speech—more like resonance through his spine.
He backed away from the glass.
"Pilot bonded. Navigation unlocked. Power integrity: 42%."
Panels on the floor lit up. One in front of him opened slightly—like a console waiting for contact.
Dren didn't move. He didn't trust it. But some part of him… understood it. Not intellectually. Viscerally. Like his body had learned something his mind hadn't caught up to.
He reached out and touched the console.
It pulsed once.
"Destination restored."
"Final stasis vector re-engaged."
"Preparing to complete primary route."
Dren took a step back. "What route?" he muttered aloud.
"Original destination: SOVEREIGN WORLD NODE. Status: Incomplete."
He blinked. "That's where you were going?"
The ship didn't answer. But it moved.
The floor tilted slightly beneath his feet. The lights surged. A deep rumble shook the walls—not violent, but definite. Something was powering up far below—an engine that hadn't fired in what could've been centuries.
Dren turned back toward the bridge window.
Khar-Tor shrank.
Slowly, like a corpse finally left to rot, the planet turned away as the ship climbed.
The pulse inside him grew louder, matching the ship's resonance. He gripped the side railing. The lights blurred. His vision wavered. Static bloomed behind his eyes.
"Initiating final transfer."
He tried to speak, but blackness curled around his thoughts like steam in a vent.
The ship lurched forward. The stars blurred.
Dren fell hard onto the bridge floor—and the last thing he saw before unconsciousness took him was a swirl of green light far ahead… too massive to be real.
Then everything went dark.
Time didn't pass the same inside the void.
There were no storms. No machines groaning through sand. No gravity pulling at his limbs. Just the silent press of weightless dark and a humming rhythm that wasn't part of space.
It was in him.
Dren Mako floated in that dark, limbs slack, mind half-awake. Static danced along the edge of his bones, faint lightning whispering through the scar-tissue of his new veins. His breathing slowed. His body pulsed.
Then—
A jolt.
He slammed back into reality like being dropped from a cliff. His spine hit metal. Air whooshed from his lungs.
Lights screamed red across the ceiling. Sirens blared—not harsh alarms, but high-toned navigational wails—systematic, calculated, angry.
The ship was descending.
Hard.
Dren rolled to one side, catching the lip of the console. Outside the viewplate, stars twisted in wild angles as a world rose up to meet him. A massive planet—larger than anything he'd ever seen—filled the window with light. Not the brittle light of Khar-Tor's failing sun, but living color.
Green. Blue. White. Alive.
He pressed closer, eyes wide.
Massive cloud banks swirled over emerald continents. Lakes the size of canyons shimmered in patches of golden sunlight. Storms crackled over endless forest belts. This world didn't just exist—it flourished.
For the first time in his life, Dren Mako saw a planet that wasn't dying.
And he couldn't breathe.
The ship screamed beneath him.
"Primary stabilization offline."
"Entry path unstable. Reversion to inertial trajectory."
"Brace for impact."
The walls twisted, lights strobing like blood pulses. Dren staggered, grabbed the side railing, and threw himself down the corridor, heading for the crash cradle room—what passed for a pilot seat in this buried tech. His boots barely touched the floor before the entire ship shook.
Atmospheric entry.
The hull roared as it scraped the edge of the upper clouds. Heat slammed across the external shell, painting the bridge windows in fire-orange streaks. G-force bent him forward. The lights blew out. Internal gravity fluctuated.
Then came the trees.
The ship didn't glide. It didn't descend. It fell.
Through canopy. Through branches thicker than tower pillars. Through walls of emerald-green vines and hanging moss and sunlight laced in color Dren had never imagined. It was beautiful—until it broke everything.
The Sable Vow slammed into a glade of trees with a thunderous roar, tearing bark and boulders as it carved a brutal path through the jungle. The sound of crushing foliage, shrieking metal, and rupturing ground filled Dren's world.
And then—
Silence.
Dust. Smoke.
The occasional creak of something settling.
The ship… had stopped.
Dren lay sprawled on the floor of the cradle chamber, head bleeding slightly, vision doubled. Somewhere inside the ship, coolant hissed. Vents cycled. Systems tried and failed to reboot.
He didn't move at first.
But then he smelled it.
Something he'd never smelled before. Something soft. Wet. Alive.
He forced himself upright and stumbled toward the exit hatch. The manual lock hissed as it disengaged, air releasing in a sharp gasp. The outer door twisted open—
And light poured in.
Not harsh light. Not radiation. Not filtered solar glare.
Real light. Sunlight. Golden and rich, cutting through a thousand shades of green.
Dren stepped forward—
And his boots sank slightly into soil.
He looked down. Not dust. Not ash.
Earth. Damp. Soft. Cool. Alive.
He dropped to his knees and touched it. His fingers dug into the ground. He turned his hand over and watched dark clumps of living dirt crumble in his palm. Tiny roots. Insects. Moisture.
His chest rose once. Sharp. He didn't realize he'd started shaking.
Then he looked up and saw it—
Grass.
Tall, swaying in the wind. Blades like blades of emerald. Flowers clustered at the edges, purple and yellow and blue.
He stood slowly. The jungle towered around him—thick trees with glowing pods, birds shrieking overhead, light filtering in beams through leaves the size of sails.
To his left, he heard it—
Water.
A stream.
He didn't think. He just ran.
His boots pounded across moss and root, through vines and shadow. The static in his body surged, his veins glowing faintly under his skin as his heart pounded harder than ever before.
He reached the stream and dropped to his knees.
Clear. Cold. Moving.
He plunged both hands into the water and drank like an animal, scooping it into his mouth, letting it pour down his face, laughing against his will.
It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever tasted.
He slipped—lost his balance—and fell into the stream, soaked and breathless and half-laughing, half-sobbing.
This wasn't Khar-Tor.
This wasn't survival.
This was life.
And then everything changed again.
Dren lay on his back in the stream, water rushing around his limbs, eyes locked on a sky he didn't know how to name.
It was blue.
Not the pale, bleached-white haze of Khar-Tor's radiation-choked atmosphere, but deep, endless, layered. Clouds moved across it like islands of light, and birds—actual birds—darted between the canopy above. Their calls were alien, wild, alive.
Water soaked through his cloak and gear, chilling his skin. But he didn't move.
He couldn't. He didn't want to.
The soil beneath him wasn't powdered rust. The air wasn't poison.
And the wind carried no static charge, no sand, no ash.
It carried… scent. Earth. Sap. Wet bark and wild pollen.
For the first time in his life, Dren wasn't running.
Not fighting.
Not hiding.
Just breathing.
His hands moved through the stream—cupping it, splashing, soaking himself again. The light caught the water's surface and painted his skin gold. He tilted his head back and laughed—hoarse, broken, unsure—but real.
The muscles in his chest ached in strange ways. Like they didn't know how to feel anything but tight.
He'd grown up inside the belly of a dying world.
He'd crawled through the skeletons of old machines.
He'd eaten fungus grown on coolant pipes and licked condensation off vent grates.
But now…
Now he was floating in a river on a planet he hadn't known existed, and everything was wrong in the best possible way.
He closed his eyes.
He let the current pull him gently downstream, arms splayed out, head half-submerged.
He imagined staying like this forever.
That's when the water shifted.
Not gently. Not like a ripple.
Like weight had entered it.
His eyes snapped open.
The stream around him trembled. Something huge had stepped into the water. He heard the splash—slow, deliberate. A shift of current that wasn't natural.
He sat up—fast.
The trees directly across from him split apart with a deep crack of broken limbs.
It emerged.
A beast the size of a hovertruck, shoulders hunched, muscle thick beneath coarse fur matted with leaves and river debris. It moved like a predator that had never once needed to fear.
A bear.
He didn't know the word. But every instinct in his bones screamed one thing:
Run.
The creature stared at him with small, black eyes. Curious. Cold. Its breath steamed in the air. Its claws were half the length of his forearm. Its snout twitched once—and then it growled.
Low. Rolling.
Claiming.
Dren scrambled backward, slipping in the river mud.
He had no blade. No bombs. His gear was back at the ship. He was soaked, unarmed, and standing ankle-deep in water with a beast made of pure violence walking toward him.
The bear entered the stream fully, water rushing around its massive legs, eyes locked on him.
Dren backed up. Fast.
"No," he muttered. "No, no—"
The bear charged.
There was no warning. No slow stalk. Just a burst of thunderous motion, trees behind it shaking as it lunged forward with terrifying speed.
Dren turned to run—but his foot slipped—he lost control—
—and in sheer panic, he jumped.
Or thought he did.
His body launched.
He didn't leap five feet. He didn't leap ten.
He flew thirty feet up and out of the stream, flipping wildly, his arms windmilling through air he never meant to touch.
He crashed down into soft moss, rolled, and slammed into a thick root hard enough to knock the breath out of him.
He coughed—once—dazed, confused, blinking up at the sky.
"What—" he gasped, "—the hell was that—"
The bear was already on him.
It cleared the stream in two bounds and rose onto its hind legs, towering over him. Its teeth bared. Its roar shook the leaves.
Dren rolled, pushed himself up, no time to think. He threw a punch.
It was instinct. Desperation. The wild, hopeless swing of someone who had no options left.
His fist met the bear's jaw—
And the world detonated.
Yellow lightning erupted from his hand in a blinding arc, slamming into the beast with a sound like a thunderclap and a sunburst. The blast didn't just strike—it tore. The current shredded fur, muscle, bone. The bear screamed—a horrible, wet, raw sound—and flew backward, crashing into the trees in a heap of smoke and broken branches.
Silence followed.
Smoke hung in the air, curling from Dren's arm. Sparks popped from his fingertips.
He stood frozen, hand still raised, eyes wide.
The bear didn't move.
His entire body trembled—not from fear, but from resonance. He could feel the lightning in his blood. Not rage. Not magic.
Just… precision. Control. Power.
He looked down at his fist.
It glowed faintly at the knuckles.
He didn't know how he'd done it. He didn't know if he'd done it.
He backed away slowly.
Then all the adrenaline left him at once.
His vision blurred. His legs buckled. He dropped to his knees in the moss and stared at the stream still flowing nearby, the water now full of ash and fur.
He raised both hands in front of his face.
Still sparking. Still alive.
"What the hell… am I…" he whispered.
The static in his chest flickered again—sharp, electric, rhythmic.
He collapsed backward onto the moss, eyes wide, breath shallow, and passed out.
The trees swayed silently overhead. The stream ran on.
Far away, the Sable Vow blinked to life again.
Darkness again.
But it wasn't empty.
It breathed.
Not like lungs. Not like wind. But with a rhythm.
A presence.
Soft. Electric.
Patient.
Dren floated through that pulse—adrift in black, his body weightless but humming. Flashes drifted through him. Not memories. Not dreams. Impressions.
A vault door closing.
Screaming metal in space.
A planet dying, not from war—but from abandonment.
And something watching from behind the stars.
Then, a whisper—though no words were spoken:
"Calibration complete."
⸻
He gasped.
Air filled his lungs like cold knives. His eyes snapped open. His body convulsed, fingers twitching with arcs of light. Sparks cracked from his forearms and danced along his collar.
He rolled to his side, groaning, muscles tight and raw.
He was back at the crash site.
Sunlight filtered through the canopy overhead, casting streaks of green and gold over the forest floor. Birds chirped somewhere far off. Wind rustled through the leaves.
But Dren felt none of it.
Not yet.
His entire body burned—not in pain, but in current.
He could feel his heartbeat like a subroutine.
Every muscle fiber hummed.
His vision flickered with afterimages—white lines that glowed and faded.
He pushed himself upright slowly, hands shaking.
The earth around where he'd fallen was scorched in a wide blast pattern—moss charred, rocks cracked, tree bark split. The bear's body lay half in shadow, steam rising from its ruined chest. It hadn't moved since the strike.
He stared at it.
Then at his hands.
Still faintly glowing. Still hot.
But stable.
No storm.
No collapse.
Just… precision.
The thought struck him like a bolt: He hadn't exploded.
He hadn't lost control.
He'd targeted. Released. Ended the threat with terrifying speed.
That strike hadn't been luck. It hadn't been panic.
It had been surgical.
He stood slowly, feet sinking slightly into the soft earth. He looked up at the towering trees, at the rays of sun cutting through the canopy like golden swords. The forest was alive with color and movement.
And in all that chaos, Dren Mako stood—alone, sparking, uncertain.
"I didn't ask for this," he muttered aloud.
The forest didn't answer. But something else did.
The ground trembled.
A low hum spread through the soil beneath his boots. Not a quake—a signal. The hairs on his arms rose. His spine stiffened. The static returned—not dangerous, but summoning.
He turned.
Far in the distance, where the trees parted and the glade returned, the Sable Vow stood partially embedded in the jungle floor. Smoke curled from its side vents. Panels hung loose. Its silhouette looked more beast than machine now—half-wrecked, half-awake.
But the lights on its outer hull were glowing.
Bright yellow.
Just like his veins.
Dren walked forward slowly.
The air grew denser with every step. The static in his chest synced with the pulses on the ship's frame—like two hearts in rhythm. Leaves bent inward as he passed, pulled by an unseen charge.
He reached the outer shell and pressed his palm against the metal.
Thm.
It pulsed beneath him.
Not just as a machine.
As something alive. Aware. Bonded.
A panel hissed open. Lights bloomed in a ring. No words came—but he didn't need them. He understood what it wanted.
The ship didn't need orders.
It recognized him.
Not as a passenger.
As pilot.
He stepped inside.
The corridor beyond was darker now, more primal. Jungle light leaked through cracks. Roots had begun to creep into exposed walls. And yet, when he passed through, the lights responded to him.
Not because he forced them.
Because they welcomed him.
He walked to the central chamber—the same place where the core had nearly killed him—and stopped in front of the pedestal.
It had changed.
Now, instead of floating alone, the core was fused—part of the ship, part of the wall. Cables coiled around it like veins, and in its center, a pulse glowed yellow, steady and constant.
It beat with his heart.
He stared at it.
Slowly, he raised one hand.
Lightning danced across his palm—not wildly. Not loud.
But controlled. Clean.
He whispered to the ship. "What are you?"
And in the silence that followed, he didn't get an answer.
He got a destination.
A new path appeared in his mind. Not coordinates. Not names. Just… a feeling. A draw. A place waiting. A place the ship had always meant to go before it crashed.
Now, with him bonded, it could finish what it started.
Dren exhaled slowly.
"I'm not a hero," he muttered.
His reflection in the glass chamber blinked with lightning.
"I'm not a chosen one. I'm not anyone."
He turned, gripping the rail as the lights rippled.
"But maybe that's the point."
⸻
Outside, the jungle swayed in silence.
The bear was dead.
The river still ran.
And in the heart of a sleeping machine, something very old had just awakened.