EDGE OF THE VOID

Kael Veyra awoke with a start, gasping as if he’d breached the surface of a dark sea. His helmet was gone. His suit was torn at the joints, but intact. He lay on a cold, metallic floor beneath a ceiling of shifting geometry—panels that folded into and out of themselves, like the ship was breathing in slow, deliberate rhythm.

The chamber was no longer the throne room.

It was something else now—something waiting.

“Elara?” he called out. His voice echoed back, strangely delayed, like it had to pass through layers of space before returning.

No response.

He rose shakily to his feet. The air smelled sterile but wrong, tinged with ozone and decay. His weapon was gone. His HUD flickered static. The last thing he remembered was the sphere—the void-born object—and that voice in his mind.

You have answered. Now you will know.

"Know what?" he muttered. His breath fogged slightly in the air. Temperature was dropping.

Lights ignited in the walls—violet veins that pulsed in time with the distant, organic hum beneath his boots. As Kael walked, the walls seemed to anticipate his steps, elongating the corridor ahead, reshaping as if guiding him. Or testing him.

Suddenly, a doorway irised open to his right, revealing a circular chamber lined with hexagonal glass pods. Inside each, there was a figure.

Humanoid. Featureless. Motionless.

He stepped forward—and the lights above flickered. One of the pods illuminated, revealing a familiar face.

“Elara.”

She floated in stasis, eyes closed, faintly glowing glyphs coiling around her body like ethereal chains.

“Elara!” Kael pounded on the glass. No reaction. No movement.

Then came the voice—not external, but within:

"Time does not move as you know it."

Kael turned instinctively, weaponless, defenseless. But there was no one there. Only more glyphs illuminating across the walls, forming patterns too complex to comprehend.

“You did this,” he growled. “What are you? What do you want?”

"We do not want. We remember."

The chamber shifted. Suddenly, Kael was no longer standing—he was falling, tumbling through impossible starscapes and dying suns, through memories that weren’t his: the collapse of ancient galaxies, civilizations annihilated by entropy, voices crying out into the Void until nothing remained but silence.

And amidst it all, a presence. Watching. Listening.

A consciousness made of shadow and thought.

---

Elsewhere – Nowhere

Elara floated in blackness—not unconscious, but disassembled. Her body was gone. Her mind was stretched across dimensions, experiencing a thousand sensations without understanding.

Then, light.

Not light as humans perceive it, but something more profound. It revealed not shapes, but concepts. Language, emotion, history—all laid bare as if pages in a book.

A question bloomed in her mind:

"What is your purpose?"

She tried to respond, but her thoughts came out broken, scattered. Then she remembered her translator module, still fused to her neural pathways.

She projected: "We explore. We learn. We survive."

There was a pause—then a ripple.

"You consume. You fracture. You echo pain into stars."

Another burst of imagery filled her senses: planets harvested, ecosystems collapsed, war after war after war. Humanity, viewed not as explorers, but as spreaders—a plague of fire and ambition.

“No,” she whispered, mental voice shaking. “We’re more than that. We create. We love. We dream.”

"Dreaming is dangerous. You approach the Veil, and dream of conquest."

The presence intensified. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t kind. It simply was. And it had seen civilizations far older than humanity rise and fall—each reaching toward the same forbidden threshold:

The Void.

"We are the First Thought," it finally said. "Born before your stars, fragmented across time. You stand on the edge."

Edge of the Void, Elara realized.

And something—something deeper—was waking.