“Oh my God, look at this!” She dropped to her knees beside a low stone bench and gently lifted a small metal cup. It was simple, elegant, the kind someone might have set down mid-meal and never returned to. The surface was still bright, etched with delicate swirling patterns that matched the starmap on her own glowing arms. “It’s… it’s warm. Like it was just set down yesterday.”
She set it down reverently and moved on, picking up a child-sized bracelet of woven crystal threads, then a broken stylus that looked like it had rolled under a table. “These people werehere. Living. Eating. Writing. Loving. And then… they were gone.” Her voice cracked with wonder. “We’re the first ones to touch any of this in two and a half million years.”
Nadine crouched beside a shattered fountain, tracing a finger along the dry basin where faint glyphs still glowed faintly under our combined light. Ashley stayed close, blaster ready, but even she looked awed. My men looked around, their eyes wide as saucers, and even Rylan kept his mouth shut for once.
I kept walking, slower, taking it all in. The city stretched out in layers, homes, market stalls, wide avenues now half-swallowed by rock. Shadows pooled thick in every corner, turning the golden light into something almost haunting. A ghost town. Perfectly preserved, yet utterly empty. The silence pressed in, broken only by the soft scrape of our boots and Ella’s delighted murmurs. We climbed a gentle rise, and there it was.
A palatial building rose before us, its white stone, which once must have gleamed like starlight, now dulled to a soft ivory by time and shadow. Massive, wide steps—broad enough for twenty people to walk abreast—led upward into a grand entrance thatdisappeared straight into the mountain itself. The structure looked half-swallowed, as though the rock had crept forward over the eons and simply folded the building into its embrace. Tall columns framed the doorway, carved with scenes I couldn’t quite make out in the shifting golden glow. Eerie shadows stretched across the steps, turning every archway into a dark mouth. The air here felt heavier. Older. Like the building was holding its breath, waiting. I swallowed hard, but I kept moving forward as if pulled by unseen forces. Ella stopped at the bottom of the steps, her eyes wide and shining with tears. “This… this was their center. Their heart. I can feel it.”
I could too.
Somewhere far above, I felt how Thyros was losing his mind trying to reach me. But right now, standing at the threshold of Ashera’s lost palace with glowing starmaps on my skin and three human women who somehow felt like allies at my side, I couldn’t bring myself to care about the overprotective alien god pacing the surface.
This place was calling to me. For the first time in my life, I wanted to answer a higher power.
We climbed the wide, white steps together, our glowing skin cast shifting pools of gold across the ancient stone. The grand entrance yawned open like a mouth frozen mid-breath. The moment we crossed the threshold, the air changed; it became cooler and heavier, but it was also charged with something sacred and sorrowful.
To the right stood a massive wall that stretched up into shadow, easily thirty yards tall and twice as wide. It was covered in starmap glyphs, intricate, flowing patterns of light that pulsed gently in time with the marks on our skin. Suns, planets, swirling galaxies, and delicate connecting threads filled the surface in breathtaking detail.
But in the very center… there was nothing.
Just blank, untouched stone. The glyphs flowed beautifully toward the middle from all directions and then simplystopped, as if the artist had been painting one moment and vanished the next. The emptiness felt violent. Deliberate. Like a scream frozen in time.
Nadine stepped closer, drawn like a magnet. She reached out but didn’t quite touch the wall; her glowing fingers hovered inches away. Her expression was distant, almost pained. We all sensed she needed the moment. The others hung back, giving her space.
I moved up beside her, studying the wall with narrowed eyes. It was unmistakably a starmap. I had seen thousands in my life, holographic 3D projections on Sythari command decks, ancient drawn charts on rebel ships. I knew the landmarks of our corner of the universe by heart: the crimson veil of the Vaelis Nebula, the triple spiral of the Karath Cluster, the dark rift of the Abyssal Fracture that the Rebel Forces called home, and the bright blue beacon of Asherael. A home I had only seen a few times, yet it anchored my soul in a way the Temples never could.
But here… nothing was familiar.
No Vaelis Nebula. No Karath Cluster. No Abyssal Fracture. The constellations were wrong. The galactic arms twisted in unfamiliar patterns. Whole sectors that should have been dense with stars were empty voids, while other regions blazed with suns I had never seen charted. The scale was… off. Vast. Older. Like this map had been drawn before the universe I knew had even taken shape. Or was of another universe entirely.
A chill crawled down my spine.
Nadine finally spoke. “It’s… it’souruniverse,” she breathed. Look, this spiral here, with the triple red suns… that’s the Pandraxian Core Systems. I’m sure of it. The way the arms curve, the density of the inner cluster, it matches every chart I’ve studied on the ship.”
Her finger swept across another section, and more glowing streaks ignited, filling in details that had been blank moments before. “And here… this dense blue nebula with the dark lane cutting through it, it's Cronos. And here… " she moved down to the right side of the map, "This… this is us. This is Earth. See, the moon, our sun. The red planet, Mars. The ring. Saturn."
Ashley leaned in, her eyes narrowed. “Yeah… that looks right. The way the stars cluster around what should be Pandrax’s position. And ours.”
I took their word for it, because this map… it represented nothing familiar to me. Which kind of made sense. The Pandraxians said they had never heard of the Sythari and vice versa. Both powerful forces. And that’s not even taking into account the Arkhevari, and yet… nobody had wandered into this part of the Universe? I got that it was vast. But… there were so many adventurous species out there, pirates, traders. All of them knew that new planets brought riches; they thrived on exploration. And yet. Both the Sythari and the Pandraxians had stopped at Earth, it seemed. Why?
In the very center of the wall, large sections remained stubbornly dark. Empty. Unresponsive.
Ashera had stood here once. I could feel it in my blood. She had painted this wall with her own power, mapping a universe that no longer existed in the same form. And then something had happened, something catastrophic enough to stop her mid-stroke and shatter everything. The ghost city around us suddenly felt heavier. The shadows deeper. The silence more watchful.
I turned to the others, the question burning in my throat. “When did the Pandraxians find Earth?”
Ashley answered first, in a voice edged with memory. “They actually didn’t. The Cryons found us first. When the Emperor learned that humans were their mekarries, the Pandraxians stepped in and took Earth under their protection.”
Ella’s glowing hands stilled on the wall. She shuddered visibly, the golden light on her skin flickering for a moment.
“Neither had the Arkhevari heard of it,” she filled us in quietly. “Not until I was brought to a planet to be swallowed by the Dark Abyss as a sacrifice.” Her voice cracked. She hugged her arms around herself, the trauma of that memory still raw even now. “That’s when they became involved.”
Ashley nodded grimly. “Don’t forget the Space Guardians, either. They showed up around the same time, watching from the edges.”
I let the words settle, and my mind raced. I studied the vast glowing map again, the Pandraxian empire reduced to a tiny, bright speck in one corner of an impossibly huge cosmos. The Sythari had their own sprawling territories, just as advanced, just as hungry for new worlds. Just not chartered on this wall. Out of reach. Purpose or accident?
“Both the Pandraxians and the Sythari are highly advanced,” I voiced my thoughts. “They’ve explored vast stretches of the universe.” I pointed at the glowing section that represented the known galaxy. “Yet look, the Pandraxian worlds are only a small speck on this map. The Sythari would probably be the same if they were on here. There are riches in uncharted space, entire sectors they’ve never touched… and somehow, they both missedthis?” I swept my glowing finger across the empty void beyond Earth. “They never ventured here. And from what I can see, nothing fromhereever ventured out there either.”
