(1st Person POV — Kyrian Killganon)
When I was fifteen, I learned what silence sounded like after a planet screamed.
Falkonda—our refuge among the shattered moons of the Yseran Belt—had been home to just under ten thousand Envoys. Engineers. Medics. Fighters. Dreamers who refused to kneel before the Unitariasts' doctrine of order and obedience.
Now, it was nothing but a drifting tomb of fire and electromagnetic decay.
I remember the smell before anything else—ozone and carbon. The taste of burned atmosphere coating my tongue. The E-Drive embedded in my neck pulsed erratically, its neural sync faltering from the shockwaves that kept rattling the bunker walls.
Lucindella's voice tore through the static in my comms. "Kyrian, status!"
I slammed a fresh power cell into my plasma sidearm and ducked behind a half-collapsed bulkhead. "Alive. For now. The reactor core's gone, and the hangar bay's—"
A white-hot explosion swallowed my words. My visor dimmed automatically, but I could still see the molten slag that had once been our escape corridor raining down in chunks the size of hovercars.
Lucindella cursed softly on the other end. Even in chaos, her voice carried that unnerving calm—like a storm eye observing itself. "The Unitariasts are jamming every transmission. The Vanguard fleet breached orbit in under four minutes. They knew where to hit."
"Someone sold us out?" I asked.
She didn't answer. That was enough of one.
---
Observe. Immerse. Calculate. Assimilate.
She had drilled those four words into me from the day she accepted me as her trainee—when I was nothing but a scrawny, trembling survivor pulled from the wreck of my birth world, Halycon-3.
The Unitariasts had erased it. Seven billion minds uploaded into oblivion—E-Drives overwritten by something else. Something uniform. Perfect. Dead.
They called it Harmony.
We called it slavery.
---
I sprinted through the maintenance ducts, plasma sidearm clutched close, heartbeat synced to the flickering pulse of the emergency lights. My neural HUD tagged dozens of hostile heat signatures converging on the command spire above me.
The Unitariasts never used soldiers—they used Reforms.
Bodies stripped of individuality, programmed to obey.
Every step I took echoed against the metal, and each echo reminded me that somewhere above, they were slaughtering what was left of my family.
When I reached the Command Dome, the doors were already melted open. The air inside shimmered with radiation from the breached core. I expected to see chaos. I didn't expect to see Lucindella standing perfectly still in the center of it—cloaked in torn Envoy armor, her dark hair flickering with sparks of data static from a damaged E-Drive.
"Kyrian," she said without turning. "You're late."
Even now, even with everything collapsing, she teased. That was Lucindella. Beautiful in that quiet, devastating way. She saw the universe like a chessboard and herself as both player and piece.
"They're here," I said, pointing toward the stairwell. "Reforms—dozens of them. We need to—"
"—observe," she interrupted.
Her tone softened. "Breathe. What do you see?"
I took a breath. The training took over.
Observe: scorch marks, three-second intervals—plasma fire.
Immerse: wind direction—pressure venting from the east.
Calculate: no chance of reinforcements. No escape ships.
Assimilate: adapt. Survive.
I turned back to her. "We're boxed in."
She smiled faintly. "Then we'll make a new box."
---
The blast shook the entire Dome as the Unitariasts breached the perimeter. Their Reforms poured through the entryway—featureless visors glowing pale blue, weapons humming in perfect synchronization.
Lucindella raised her arm. In her palm, a tiny sphere blinked red. "Kyrian, take this."
I hesitated. "What is that?"
"The last seed of Ja'suka."
Her eyes met mine. "You will finish what we started."
Before I could argue, she slammed her other hand against the console beside her. The floor beneath me opened like the throat of the world, and I fell—swallowed by light, heat, and the howl of the evacuation rail system.
---
I woke to silence. Real silence. The kind that follows annihilation.
The pod's canopy cracked open, and cold starlight spilled in. I was adrift among the asteroid fields that had once been Falkonda's orbit.
No communications. No pulse from her E-Drive beacon.
Just debris.
I clenched the small metallic sphere in my hand—the seed she had given me. Its surface pulsed faintly, almost like a heartbeat. My visor HUD couldn't identify its material. That meant it was older tech. Ja'suka tech. Forbidden.
A transmission echoed faintly through the static of open space—a Unitariast newsfeed, still broadcasting propaganda on the public network.
> "The terrorist organization known as The Envoys of Ja'suka has been neutralized following decisive intervention by the Unity Vanguard. Citizens are reminded to report all suspicious network anomalies and unlicensed E-Drive activities."
Their voice was calm. Cold. Almost gentle.
As if genocide were a form of mercy.
---
I floated there for what felt like hours. Watching fragments of Falkonda—our home—drift like ash. Watching stars bleed red through the cracks in my visor.
My fingers brushed the back of my neck. The E-Drive port there still hummed faintly. As long as it stayed intact, I wasn't dead. Not really.
No one truly died anymore. That was the curse of this age.
Lucindella had taught us that death had become irrelevant—what mattered was purpose.
She used to say, "When you can't die, you either lose your meaning or become it."
I finally understood what she meant.
I looked at the sphere again.
At the hollow void where a world once was.
At the reflection of my own eyes—no longer frightened, no longer human.
"I'll finish it, Luci," I whispered. "Whatever Ja'suka is… whatever they feared—it lives now."
I engaged the thrusters on the pod, setting a course toward the nearest unregistered star route.
Behind me, Falkonda's remains vanished into a dying sun.
Ahead, the dark stretched infinite and waiting.
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End of Chapter 1