A small grey skinned 3 eyed and tusked alien creature tapped its fingers on a desk before it froze mid-tap.
The pressure struck like a wrong note in a familiar song—subtle, directional, impossible to ignore. Simultaneously a call rang on Navamiras communicator
Her third eye snapped open.
On a distant planet Matria felt it as well.
Her first thought was clinical.
Localized Aeru disturbance. Non-catastrophic. Persistent.
Her second was not.
That shouldn't still be there.
Aeru did not react without cause. Pressure answered structure. Resistance invited attention.
Demons avoided storms. They fed on fractures. They pressed only where boundaries thinned or failed.
This was different.
This was pressure meeting resistance.
The signal moved through approved channels, stripped of emotion, reduced to structure—yet something unapproved rode alongside it, tight and quiet. Secretly sent to Navamira
Find it.
No name. No species.
Just a point where the universe leaned and failed to collapse.
Matria's expression did not change.
Navamirah's tusked grin spread, excitement bleeding through where caution should have lived.
"Still standing?" Navamirah murmured to herself, already moving, already chosen.
A few solar systems distance away, Matria closed her eyes for a fraction of a second—long enough for something almost like relief to surface, then vanish.
Something was holding shape.
And something hated that it was.
—
A curly-haired blonde human teen of seventeen wandered the frozen streets of the grand city of Cocyu.
Snow fell in slow, silent sheets, catching in his hair and melting against skin already numb. He sat shirtless beneath the skeletal overhang of a shuttle port, knees pulled tight to his chest. His pale body was a map of old violence—healed scars layered over fresh ones, purple and black beneath the cold.
His breathing was uneven. Shallow. Every breath burned.
He had been beaten again.
Worse than the bruises was what the beating always invited. Pain was a signal. Fear was a flare. And something in the dark responded to signals.
He was the only human on this planet. As far as he knew, the last one in the universe.
Humans were hated by every other species.
Not because they still ruled.
Not because they still threatened anyone.
Because they had once mattered—and then had chosen not to.
Decades ago, before he was born after the war that tore humanity apart and scarred half the galaxy in the process, humans had done something no other species had ever dared. Out of guilt, out of horror at what they had unleashed, they had surrendered their power willingly.
Not to an enemy.
To consensus.
The Excision Accord had been born from that choice.
It was not an empire. Not an army. Not a cult.
It was pure procedure.
Through it, the dominant powers of the galaxy identified species whose continued existence destabilized Aeru-aligned civilization and removed them from relevance.
Extermination was not always the first step.
But it was always the final one.
The Accord did not declare war.
It declared irrelevance.
Humanity had been the Accord's first proof of concept.
They dismantled their own institutions. Relinquished their claim to Aeru-shaping authority. Accepted erasure as penance.
That had been decades ago.
Riht had been born after the decision.
He had never seen a human city. Never heard a human language spoken aloud. Never known a time when humanity was anything but a concluded matter.
He was not a threat.
He was a remainder.
Someone passed near the port entrance.
A voice, loud and irritated:
"Move it, trash."
A large figure with silver fur bristling across its body shoved Riht aside as it passed—flat face, slit nostrils where a nose should have been, diagonal slits like long nostrils along its cheeks. Others of its kind followed, laughing as they went.
Riht hit the concrete hard, breath bursting from his chest.
None of the nearby soldiers reacted.
They stood in their patrol lines beneath Cocyu's cold lights—armored, armed, expressionless—watching crowds, not individuals.
Cocyu's soldiers were not peacekeepers. They were traffic control for fear—trained to stop riots, not cruelty. Order mattered. Individuals did not.
Cocyu was tightly controlled and poorly watched.
A punishment posting, some said. A city important enough to monitor, unimportant enough to remember.
No one important checked Cocyu anymore.
No one important checked on him.
They didn't need to kill him.
Humanity had already been agreed upon.
Laughter faded. Footsteps receded.
The lights above the port flickered.
For a moment, the world dimmed.
The darkness didn't come all at once.
It crept.
It pooled beneath the shuttle rails, thickened behind crates, stretched along the walls like something learning how to move.
Riht felt it before he saw it: a pressure at the base of his skull, a crawling sensation beneath his skin.
He had gone through this for as long as he could remember.
He lifted his head.
Shadows stood where there should have been nothing.
Tall. Bent. Too thin.
Their outlines wavered, never quite holding shape. Some had too many limbs. Some had none. Eyes opened within them—pale, distant, wrong—then vanished again.
They did not approach.
They waited.
They always did.
Riht noticed the pattern without surprise. They never rushed. They never needed to.
They liked him most when he moved wrong—when he begged, when he fought, when he proved he still believed the universe owed him mercy.
He had learned that reacting too soon made it worse.
The shadows leaned closer, stretching across the snow, across the concrete then, across him.
He did not pull away from the darkness.
He felt them then—not just around him, but within. Pressing against his ribs. Curling along his spine. Whispering without sound and without any clear word.
As though the space he occupied had always been meant to be filled by them.
A small hand suddenly slammed down on his shoulder.
Riht flinched violently, gasping—
A gray-skinned alien stood beside him, no taller than two and a half feet. She had three eyes, one set high on her forehead. That eye shone wide and delighted, brimming with warmth that felt almost obscene against the cold. The other two matched the cold perfectly cold and emotionless.
The shadows recoiled.
In calculation.
Like predators smelling a larger, more dangerous beast had marked its territory.
They did not vanish. They retreated, sinking back into the dark like something losing interest—for now.
Her tusked smile widened. Riht stared at her, uncertain whether the warmth he felt was real—or whether he was freezing to death.
"Let big sis help you out."