“You ask too many questions.”
He sprinted toward the ship while rebels covered our retreat with precise bursts of fire. The loading ramp slammed downward before we even reached it. Several armed males appeared in the opening. One of them froze when he saw me.
“Have you lost your mind?” he muttered. “A Prime Luminae?”
“She insisted,” the stranger snapped.
"His invitation was irrefusable." I countered.
We crossed the ramp just as blaster fire exploded against the ship hull behind us. The doors sealed instantly. The engines roared, and the only home I had ever known disappeared beneath us. I stared through the viewport as the golden towers shrank rapidly into the distance.
My entire life vanishing beneath clouds and smoke. No more ceremonies. No more sacred cages. No more pretending I belonged there. A strange mixture of exhilaration and terror twisted through me.
I should have been afraid. Instead, I smiled. Wildly. The rebel noticed immediately.
“That,” he informed me gravely, “is not a normal reaction to being kidnapped.”
I looked up at him. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to leave.”
He broke out into loud laughter. "You, Prime Luminae, will fit right in."
"Naeris," I snarled. I hadn't been trained in any kind of physical violence; if anything, I had been trained to avoid it. So when I boxed his shoulder, I hurt myself more than him, but the tone of my voice must have made up for it.
Because he tilted his head, laugh lines dancing around his eyes and lips as he acquiesced, "Naeris."
Later, I found out that he was Kael’Varyn, one of the high-up rebel leaders.
But right then, I was distracted by a nudge from the mysterious bond deep inside me. It pulsed once. Letting me know it was waiting.
The ship hada smell that no one but me seemed to notice. Cold ozone. Burned synthetics. The faint rot of gravity, slowly folding in upon itself. It permeated the recycled air, clung to the ship’s walls, and bled from its seams with a nervous metallic chill I had long since learned to associate with the Dark Abyss.
I pressed my hand against the observation glass and watched darkness slide past in endless ribbons. Somewhere inside it waited my palace. My home.
The others liked to call it ostentatious. They mocked the thirty bedrooms, the endless halls, the oversized dining chambers large enough to host entire battalions. I always shrugged them off. The truth was far less amusing. I did notneedthirty bedrooms.
But silence felt smaller in larger spaces.
An empty corridor hurt less when it stretched endlessly instead of ending too quickly. Vast rooms made the loneliness feel intentional rather than pathetic. Grand halls filled with untouched tables and glowing lights created the illusion that someone might arrive eventually. Sometimes I left doors open simply to hear movement echo through the palace when I walked. Sometimes I would activate entire wings I never entered, just so the place would feel alive around me.
Because the alternative was admitting that I had restored a palace large enough for a kingdom, only to spend millions of years wandering it alone while the Harrowed One whispered in the dark.
Ella’s—Zapharos' Aelyth—voice pulled me back to the present. She sounded like she was already halfway done with what was probably another archaeological dissertation, and her voice spilled over with breathless animation. “I can't even begin to imagine what we'll find with all that new technology I have available now. Even ruins that have already been excavated—” she caught herself as Zapharos shot her a look, then grinned, undampened. “Sorry. It’s just… We could be the first inside a temple that hasn’t seen light in millennia. Isn’t that incredible?”
She aimed the question at the room, but really it was meant for Nadine—Dravok's Aelyth—who’d wedged herself into the crook of a viewport, knees tucked to her chest, eyes fixed on the Dark Abyss as the vessel surged away from it. Nadine’s fingers drummed a restless pattern on the glass. Even now, I could sense the way her thoughts hammered the invisible surface, analysis, conjecture, fragments of probability blooming and collapsing in real time.
“You’re all missing the part where that should haveripped time apart,” Nadine exclaimed breathlessly. “We crossed a relativistic shear at the edge of a black hole and only lostthree point two seconds. That’s not physics, that’s interference.” Hervoice dropped, almost to herself. “Unless the event horizon isn’t passive… unless something in there ismodulating spacetime.”
Dravok snorted. “It isn’t modulation, it’s innovation.”
Zapharos made a derisive noise that might have been a laugh or a challenge. “You call Pandraxian technology an innovation. I call it a threat.”
He was pacing, as always, long strides that emphasized both his rigidity and anxiety. His armor fit him like a second skin, dark plates shifted with every movement, but right now, the usual sense of stability had bled out of him. I watched the way his jaw flexed, noted the tension in his fingers, and found myself mirroring it unconsciously.
“You're the one who decided we needed to contact them,” Dravok remarked, but there was no real bite in his voice.
“We don’t serve at the leisure of Emperor Daryus and his puppets. But there is no shame in letting them think that,” Zapharos spat, and the room went a degree colder.
Ella sidled over to me, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial hush. “He’s going to stroke out before we reach Earth, isn’t he?”
