The alarms screamed before the stars did.
Captain Kael Mercer stood at the fractured window of the Erebos-9 outpost, watching its dying
sun collapse in on itself. The light flickered like a candle fighting for breath, painting his face
in gold and blood-red.
He whispered, "Not again."
Behind him, the evacuation sirens wailed as people ran through the metal corridors, but Kael
didn't move. The weight of his past pinned him harder than any gravity generator ever could.
Every dying light reminded him of the one he failed to save.
A shadow flickered. A transmission pinged through the static a voice he knew too well, one
that should have been impossible.
"Kael... if you can hear me... I'm still out here."
He froze.
Her voice.The woman he lost in the collapse of the Helion Rift five years ago. The woman whose last
breath still haunted him in every dream.
The transmission cut into silence.
Kael turned away from the window. The sun of Erebos-9 imploded, swallowing itself in a
violent burst of white. Panic erupted through the outpost as lights flickered and metal moaned.
Kael made his choice.
He sprinted for the docking bay, heart pounding, lungs burning. Behind him, the outpost
cracked apart, the edges glowing molten as its orbit decayed.
His ship, the Nightborne, powered up as he leapt into the cockpit.
"Plot course," he said, voice shaking. "Search for the source of that transmission."
The ship's AI hesitated. "Captain… that region is restricted. It no longer exists."
Kael stared at the star map as the coordinates distorted like a wound in space.
"I don't care," he whispered.
The Nightborne launched into the collapsing sky, engines screaming against the pull of the
dying sun.
Kael didn't know what waited for him. A trap. A ghost. A fragment of memory.
But he knew one thing:
He would chase her voice across the ends of the galaxy.