Prologue - Hollow Dominion

Astral Year 18X

Final Century of the 18th Millennium

Uncharted Star System

PROLOGUE: VISIONS OF THE VEIL

A horizon of black broken glass — desert crust vitrified by some violence older than memory — glittered under a thin sun. Beyond it, low on the celestial canvas, the Veil stained the firmament like an old bruise: not close, not far, an edge the mind refused to measure.
Two figures picked their way across a ridgeline toward a half-buried structure whose angles did not agree with the rock.
The woman walked in front, in strides — confident, with purposeful movement.

Her armor was silver chased with gold, light sliding across it like a distant star. A thin, short, curved energy sword rode one hip, a Veilshot pistol on the other — a weapon the Engineers had banned for instability, though she trusted it; she could count the times it had saved her life, and ended others. Her long dark hair was braided into twin ropes clasped with gold. She wore no helmet, just a half-mask respirator when necessary. She preferred the air to know her face, Kael had once said, and she had smiled without denying it. Her movements were fluid, economical, and assured. Hope lived in her face without softening it; cunning lived in her eyes without hardening them.

Warlord Sorilla of the Callanius — warrior, tactician, and the heart of the Dominion’s first armies — was the most dangerous thing on that world, and the most alive.

Kael walked at her shoulder. Younger than statues would later claim, heavier in presence than any carving could hold. He wore a commander’s armor with the ease of habit, helm clipped at his belt rather than over his head. His attention was a weapon he pointed at the world. The Dominion already lived in how he stood: pragmatic, unsentimental, built of decisions that had killed men and saved others. Sorilla was the only vector he trusted more than doctrine. Then there had been Veroun.

Veroun was just as fierce a warrior as Kael. They had been the ones to forge the way for their other siblings. Where Kael and his siblings were meant to be the armor and fortress of the Dominion, Sorilla had been meant for deadlier things — the true weapon of the universe. She had been made to strike the Veil with power unknown to most. Becoming one with Kael had been within the Engineers’ foresight, whether the purpose of her creation or not; it had been a true union of power.

“Veroun swears it sits beneath the western shelf in his report,” Sorilla said, scanning the slope, her voice low as if not to wake something ancient. “He believes the Engineers’ maps — and their stories — have some truth in them.”
Kael’s mouth turned, not quite a smile. “Veroun has always believed their myths. He sees potential in the words of fanatics.” He knelt beside her, moving an attachment on his weapon. Using its scope, he brought the broken monument into view.

“Power where they see holiness,” she replied. “That’s why he listens when others laugh. Power and secrets — that’s what drives him.”
“Drives him to madness,” Kael muttered.

Sorilla glanced at him sidelong, amused. “Still measuring scars?”
“He’s my blood. We were the first brothers. Yet he’s never forgiven the galaxy for choosing me over him,” Kael said.
A faint smirk rippled on Sorilla’s face, clear from the corners of her respirator. “Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I did. The Engineers never expected their two projects to become one, and I don’t think I did either,” she said.
“I am a better warrior because of you,” Kael admitted.
Sorilla walked over to him and placed a gentle gloved hand on his face. She leaned in, with enough playful bite in her words, her voice low. “You are the Autarch because of me.”

The line landed softly, but Kael felt it like a weight. Once, it had been just him and Veroun, twin blades cut from the same forge. Then Sorilla had been brought into the fold — separately, by the Engineers’ design. Another lineage for the Dominion. This had been a testament to the Engineers’ ability and their attempts to build new bloodlines. The three had become something else. Now Veroun hunted his own secrets and plotted in shadows within dark sectors, unbeknownst to them, leaving Kael to be the one who built an empire from iron and blood to save their people.

Sorilla was respected by all — Kael’s sister Vissila especially; she saw a deadly conviction in her sister-in-war that she could not ignore. Their similarities were not by accident, but by design. Nothing was oversight in the machinations of the Holy Engineers of Korahn — first of the Fleet, creators of the Dominion. Everything was deliberate and calculated. The Warlords trusted in their family and in their purpose; Sorilla was to deliver them to the Veil and conquer that which sought their ruin.

Kael felt something tighten in his mind and follow into his gut — something he couldn’t shake so easily. The gut feeling of unease sank in him.

“So we are to follow his rumor,” Kael muttered under his breath.

Sorilla caught this. “It is no rumor, Kael.” She had a smile that was both warm and merciless.

“Can we be so sure? Veroun has been off in other systems for months now. Who is to say he isn’t throwing us into the maw of death here?” he replied, gesturing to the rolling sands of the planet.

“Always so suspicious of your brother’s actions. You think he seeks to take the Dominion for himself?” she said.

“I think he seeks its downfall; his obsession with the Old Gods and their religions is disturbing. Like he forgets our true mission. If this relic is so important to him, why not come here himself?” he said with conviction.

“It’s true, I don’t agree with his interests either. But if this relic is what he says it is, I think it could be the key to saving our people,” Sorilla assured him.

“What do you expect it to be?” he asked, because he believed more in her words than any man’s.
“Older than the Dominion. Older than even the wars that came before the Veil. Before us.” Her eyes followed the impossible angles of the buried structure.
“Something that knew of the Veil before it came to be. Hopefully, something that will save us from it. A secret woven by the wound of the stars itself.”

“And what if it cannot save us?” Kael said.

She stopped, the wind tugging at her braids, a sly smile touching her lips. “Then do not let it doom us.”

They spoke like a team, like lovers, like weapons that had learned each other’s actions. The talk of children was not in their mouths, but it lingered in the air between them — a promise deferred until a galaxy stopped bleeding, the start of a new power once they could promise those children safety.

The structure rose before them. It was both temple and machine: columns that seemed to grow from stone, not cut; conduits that stretched from within like tendons; inscriptions carved in a script that made the eye want to blink it away. A dune’s collapse had revealed a throat of shadow. Sorilla’s pistol stayed holstered. Her curved blade slid free with a hiss. Kael checked his sidearm without looking down.

Inside, the light was blue and patient. The floor had held its polish for a thousand storms. The air tasted faintly bitter, of something not of this world — as if the very atoms in that place had shown themselves. Symbols repeated at human height: a circle bitten by a crescent; a hand with too many joints; a star veiled by threads.

“The Engineers will want the walls,” Kael muttered.

“They can have the walls,” Sorilla said. “We are here for the Relic.”

As they moved deeper into that space, the Navigator felt the walls folding onto him, as if the corridors remembered being narrower — or wider — depending on who walked. The temple was not large; it was densely packed. The vision shifted endlessly until stabilizing once more as the weight within his skull grew.

In the central chamber, the relic lay awaiting its new eyes.
It was not a statue, not a weapon, nor a core. A slab of black-violet lamina sat cradled in ribbed metal that hummed at the threshold of hearing — low and disturbing. Its surface drank the light and returned it as depth. Threads webbed it like veins or fractures, and as Sorilla approached, they seemed to align with the bones of her wrist. Her skin flexed and moved as muscles reacted to a primal, ancient power.

“Definitely pre-Dominion,” she breathed. “This is… the secret. The heart itself, bound and waiting.” Her gloved fingers hovered an inch above it. “Do you feel that?”

Kael did not answer. He hated naming sensations. But he felt it — a pressure behind his teeth, an ache like a sound had burrowed deep in his skull, back into his mind, and he wanted nothing more than to pull it out. The relic was not an object. It was a living thing.

He circled it slowly. “Volatile,” he said. “Something about this doesn’t feel right. Perhaps we were wrong to seek this out?”

“We cannot know that just yet; there is still hope,” Sorilla’s eyes were bright and calm. “We need to listen to it. Find out what it is doing here, why it was left behind, forgotten.”

He almost laughed. “How does one listen to such a thing?”

“Touch,” she said simply, with a smile that calmed Kael’s mind, and she pressed her palm — bare now — against its surface. Her bones and tendons from her fingertips to midway up her arm seemed to move systematically in unison with the pulse of the organic slab.

The chamber listened back — a conversation between realms. Something larger than reality seemed to peer around a corner where one met the other. They felt watched by something incomprehensible. The hum deepened, not louder but closer, as if it had decided to speak at the distance between skin and blood. The threads rippled like breath under a thin sheet. The Veil on the horizon pushed one shade darker in the mind’s sky.

Kael stepped closer without meaning to, his body moving instinctively as if pushed. His hand covered hers. For a heartbeat — two, three — the room resolved into terrible clarity. He knew the exact number of columns, how many steps wide, and how many hidden secrets lay beneath them all without counting. He saw the entire planet like a round stone in his palm. Something resonated within his body, touching his being in a way locked deep inside. He knew this was far beyond what they had expected to find, and that frightened him. He knew that this thing could point them in the right direction, but whether it was toward salvation or doom was another matter entirely.

Sorilla pulled away first, slowly but instinctively. “We have to mark this and return with a relic team,” she said, though both of them knew she would argue to return alone — just the two of them and a short list of tools. “The rebels will have scouts, no doubt. Veroun’s rumor will not stay ours by dark.”
“Veroun is too eager,” Kael said, slipping into the old quarrel that kept him from admitting his fear. “He believes every word the Engineers breathe and sees every relic as a throne for himself.”

The rebels were not a new threat to the Dominion. No — they had been nearly created by the Dominion themselves. Resistors to conquest, they rejected the ways of its campaign. The remainder of House Deyrinth, aristocrats who were the first to reject the Dominion, were the ones to spark the beginning of the rebellion. They sought not to tamper with the Veil and chose to keep the old ways, originally in an attempt to maintain their comfort of aristocracy and high status, but it quickly took on a new form for those who wished to cling to the surviving galaxy. 

Some civilizations surviving on distant planets outside the Veil’s destruction had decided not to fall in line and join the fleets. They had not rebelled; they had simply chosen to continue as they always had. Others, however, had met the Dominion with harsh disagreement, forming their own fleets and armies to combat them. They lacked the bio-engineered strength of the Dominion’s warriors, but where they lacked superhuman might, they made up for it in conviction and numbers — not ruled by any one leader but rather a collective effort.

The hum in the chamber grew, no longer shaking only their minds but now the very foundation of the cavernous temple. The first tremor came like a breath drawn deep within the structure. Fine dust lifted from the polished floor and slid into hidden recesses. It hung suspended in blue light in absolution. Somewhere above, the rocks gave a single helpless shudder as small stones shook free from the ceiling.

Sorilla’s hand was already on his wrist, ready to move. There was no panic, just concerted motion between two warriors who did not need to rely on words to communicate. A glance between them, and they knew what the next move was.

They turned from the cradle, the blue patience of light resting on their backs. The corridors leading back out of the ruin seemed to shift and spin with their steps, the lingering energy of the relic resonating outward until the chamber itself remembered its original form. At the threshold of the chamber leading to the tunnels out, Sorilla paused. Looking back, she regarded not the relic, not the temple, but their mission. She looked to Kael.

“We must come back,” she commanded.
“We will, but first we must make sure we can come back,” he replied softly.

All the ideals, all the iron and fire between them, narrowed to a single vow.
Sorilla nodded slowly. “We will save our people.”

They continued out through the tunnels as slabs of rock and ruin cascaded behind them, sealing off any hope of easily retrieving the relic. Soon, they followed the conduits to their escape. The ruin vomited the Warlords back into the hard light of the planet’s setting sun.

Heat slammed across the plateau. Dust blasted their armor. Above the ridge, rebel ships punched through the high air in a black cascade—gunships first, then heavy landers, transports descending on columns of fire. Their shadows ran like spilled oil over the glassed desert. Troop hatches opened before the engines had cooled, and men poured out, shouting, banners flying rebellion emblems, energy rifles pointed, faces smeared with pointed aggression.

No barricades. No fallback line. No backup. Just open rock and a long drop to the valley beyond.
“A whole fleet?” Kael said, observing the descending mass of ships. “This is too sudden. How could they possibly have found this location so quickly? And under Dominion sights?”
Sorilla didn’t waste a breath. “Let’s move.” Her Veilshot cleared a leather holster with a clean, brutal click. The curved sword angled behind her hip, ready to drag a throat open from chin to spine. “We have two minutes before we are swarmed.”

Kael scanned the horizon. Even more landers broke into the planet’s atmosphere — too many for any rumor, as he had suspected, but one born of hate. He didn’t say the name that lived under his tongue. He put himself between the ruin’s mouth and the oncoming line, armor blackened with the temple’s dust. “We cut through the first wave and keep pushing.”
“Together,” Sorilla said, and the word set the shape of the next few minutes. “We’re making it off this rock.”

The first horde crested the ridge — a wall of bodies and massive muzzle flashes. The plateau erupted. Bullets screamed by; plasma boiled the thin air. Sorilla moved like an answer to a challenge: the Veilshot’s first round took a captain from his feet, the second blew the chest out of a gunner, the third cooked a grenade in a trooper’s belt and turned a knot of men into red vapor. As they moved through, scarlet rain painted them and the desert sand — for a moment, the rain held like a change in weather. Holstering in one motion and meeting the charging line with her blade, her energy-sword carved through primitive armor plate and bone with ease. She stepped through a throat, pivoted under a rifle butt, broke a wrist, split a spine. The gold clasps at the ends of her braids clacked against her back like the metronome of a killing song she sang through motion.

Kael’s work was colder, more rigid — less of an art and more of a systematic machine. Two shots, two skulls fragmented, crimson-pink staining the hot sand below as men were erased from existence before him. Fist through a helm plate, boot through a chest, sidearm barking in tandem with blade swings — flashes of the Dominion’s engineered brutality at work. Working surgically in a bloodbath, he left his enemies in piles behind him without mercy, the calculus of his survival measured in inches of blood.

Gunships raked the rock — splintered stone flying in every direction. The ruin behind them coughed a last lungful of dust, then went still. The air took on a taste like hot copper and battery acid. Landers slammed down closer, jaws lowering. Another horde of rebels poured out.
“Left!” Sorilla called, and Kael was already there, breaking a rush. For a moment, it worked — two figures slaying a lane through a mass, everything narrowed to the width of their shoulders.

The shot that took her came from the second line — a heavy round from a Devastator, a large, brutal weapon capable of absolute carnage. It hit square on the breastplate, center mass. The armor did its job — mostly. The impact threw her backward into a low spire of vitrified sand that did not forgive. She was up again at once because her body had been trained to betray pain and ignore its cost, but her left side sagged, and her next breath caught hard.

Kael’s head snapped toward her. “Sorilla!” he yelled into the masses at the same moment his blade freed the head of a man, blood arcing from the neck.

A shape detached from the smoke and dust behind her — no insignia, no banner, the rags of a cloak boiled black by ship exhaust. Close. Too close. A gloved hand flashed. A burning blade went in under Sorilla’s arm where the plate left room for the joint — a deliberate, practiced strike that found meat and artery. The figure’s face was a smear of ash and oil behind a cracked visor. The eyes were steady. The knife twisted. Then the shadow was gone, swallowed by the heaving wall of men.

Sorilla’s mouth opened without sound as blood left her lips.
The world tightened to a singular point.

Kael’s scream had no word in it. It ripped out of him like something with claws, tearing out of another beast. Every nerve lit, every synapse fired. The glass underfoot fractured in a radius. Heat imploded lightly with a deafening sound before it slammed outward around him. The air stuttered with a rippling distortion, and men too close folded as if struck by a pressure hammer, ribs collapsing inward with the wet percussion of a kicked door, blood coughing from their punctured lungs. Kael moved, and the Veil moved with him — invisible but felt, edges bending to his will, to his rage.

Inside the temple, the relic pulsed.

A trooper rushed him foolishly; Kael caught the man by the face, and where his fingers closed, the skull was crushed into bloodied wet chalk. He hurled the body into the advancing line.
He didn’t think. He broke.

Sword in one hand, carnage in the other, he plowed into the pressing horde. His blade butchered men cleanly, violet lightning rippling out from every limb and body separated. The pulses from his fist pounded through armor and cooked the meat beneath; at close range, they blew holes through torsos wide enough to see the dwindling daylight choked out by dust now red and lit with the glow of the Veil stretched in the sky. A gunship strafed low, and he threw a hand up with a snarl — energy he didn’t know he had simply happened — and the craft’s intake whined, then screamed, then imploded. It fell and shredded the rock with its ventral side and ground itself apart in a howl of tearing metal. Men ran. Some dropped weapons and sprinted for the horizon. Some just stood in awe and cowered, as if that could save them from the onslaught his rage had begun.

Inside the temple, the relic pulses.

A trooper rushes him foolishly; Kael catches the man by the face, and where his fingers close in the skull is crushed into bloodied wet chalk. He hurls the body into the advancing line.

He doesn’t think. He breaks.

Sword in one hand, carnage in the other, he plows into the pressing horde. His blade cleanly butchering men with ease, violet lightning rippling out from every limb and body separated. The pulses from his fist pound through armor and cook the meat beneath; at close range, they blow holes through torsos wide enough to see the dwindling daylight choked out by dust now red and lit with the glow of the veil stretched in the sky. A gunship strafes low, and he throws a hand up with a snarl—energy he doesn’t know he has simply happens—and the craft’s intake whines, then screams, then implodes. It falls and shreds the rock with its ventral side and grinds itself apart in a howl of tearing metal. Men run. Some drop weapons and sprint for the horizon. Some just stand in awe and cower as if that could save them from the onslaught his rage has begun.

Sorilla was on her knees. Blood painted the join of her cuirass, trickled along the filigree, and beaded at the edge of her jaw. She still had her blade, but the hand around it shook. She stabbed the ground to stay upright and hissed air through her teeth. When Kael reached her, she didn’t waste the second they didn’t have.

“Move,” she said between breaths, and he obeyed the word even as he was already lifting her.

Debris pinned her left leg — a slab of fractured rock the size of a door. He got his fingers under it and tore. Tendons stood in his throat, his eyes gone wide and pale. The slab came away; the edges cut his palms, bleeding for a mere moment before violet energy sealed the wounds as they opened — a newfound resilience he had not yet known, alien even to their deliberate design. He slid an arm under her shoulders. Her weight found the old place there; it always had.

They ran.

Running and killing were now one for Kael. Anything between him and the dropship stopped being. He swung with a yell so guttural that as his blade cut clean from shoulder to hip, a man fell into two without a whimper. He hammered a pulse into a knot of soldiers, and the blast folded them around a crater.

“What is this… power?” she said weakly. Her head lolled against his neck. Her breath graced his skin, hot and wet, life still in it.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said — not an order, a plea.
“Yes, sir,” she said lightly, breathy, though her voice was far off somewhere.

A lander dropped so close the wash lifted them half a step. The ramp slammed into the sand. Legionaries armored in Callanius’ black flooded down shouting for him, then fell silent when they saw his face.
“Back!” he roared, not trusting himself with more. They halted, laid a corridor of cover fire, and decimated any remaining rebels in sight. He climbed the ramp with Sorilla in his arms, turned on, and emptied the gauntlet into the crowd without looking. Men bent. Guns broke. Then the ramp was up and the lander lunged skyward.

Inside, there was the kind of light that made blood look brown. Archaic medical drones chittered, lined up, reached with needles. Kael’s snarl emptied the air. The drones hesitated, then retreated to the ceiling like insects fleeing a boot. He removed his gauntlets.

He laid Sorilla on the metal bench and dropped to his knees. The armor creaked with the pressure of his posture. He ripped the plate open where the heavy round had punched in. The underlayers were burned. The flesh beneath was bruised. The puncture of the blade in her side, however, still bled. How he wished she had found the same new power in that moment. The gash was deep, and every motion was painful for her. He pressed both hands against the wound and felt her heat leaving. He pushed harder.

Sorilla’s eyes found him. They were still the same brown they had been a quarter hour ago on the ridge, but something in them had started to step away. She lifted a hand that weighed more than a rifle and touched his cheek where dust had made a map. Her thumb smeared a clear line.
“Don’t,” she whispered. The word caught. She dragged another breath up like gravity. “Don’t let this… consume you.”

His jaw worked. The tendons showed like wires. A sound bubbled in his chest that had nowhere to go. He forced it down with the same strength he had used to decimate the battlefield.
“Save them,” she said. “Save our people.” The next breath was a shiver.
“That is our mission, together,” Kael said, holding her close to his face, feeling the fleeting warmth of her breath.
Sorilla placed her hand on his face gently, but not before Kael removed her glove to feel her skin on his.
“It is your mission… now, my Autarch,” she said with a quivering smile.
“Leave the titles. Save your strength. Stay with me, Sorilla.” He placed his hand against hers, feeling its weight begin to leave.

Her eyes failed to focus, the energy to keep them open becoming a strength she didn’t have. She had never felt so final; she knew this would take her, and that it could break Kael for eternity.
“I will always be with you,” she said, in breaths more than words.

He didn’t hear the roar of the engines, or the clipped reports from the flight deck, or the drone of the med-bay systems trying to talk to him like a child. He heard her lungs working. He heard the wrong rhythm of her heart stutter and drag. He heard the scrape of her armor against his when her hand slipped from his face. He caught it and set it back where it belonged because he refused the physics of failure.
“I am here,” he said, voice raw enough to cut. “I am here.”
She smiled with one corner of her mouth because both corners would have been a lie. “You always were, my Kael.”

The dropship punched through the atmosphere. The light thinned, then hardened. Sorilla’s chest lifted once, twice, a third time. She exhaled, and something in the air changed — a tautness leaving a line. Her eyes stayed on him. The focus unwound. The rest of her followed.

Kael did not move for a length of time he would later misremember on purpose. At some point, a Legionary knelt and reached, and Kael’s head came up with all the mercy of a closing door. The Legionary found he had other duties elsewhere.

When Kael finally stood, it was with the careful economy of a man lifting a cathedral stone. He smoothed Sorilla’s braids with the backs of his knuckles and cleaned the dried blood from the gold clasps because that was what his hands could still fix. He closed her eyes, and at the same time his own, as if that bound the act.

Out the small viewport in the cockpit, the planet lay under a haze of dust, and beyond the limb the Veil smeared the dark like a fresh wound. Storm fronts coiled at the edge of the atmosphere where the landers still dropped and lifted.

Kael braced a hand on the bulkhead until the shaking in his arms became stillness. When it did, the stillness was not the kind that forgave. He looked down at what he had lost and what he would never allow the galaxy to keep from him again. No words came.

As the lander entered the Callanius’ hangar, what followed was nothing short of a funeral. Crowds of citizens cried and watched in horror as their War Queen was carried in the arms of their Autarch, a visage of stone determination showing no emotion other than the respect she deserved. There had been no need to bring her anywhere other than his chamber. Here, he would call on the Engineers to do something that they would first protest as blasphemy.

His chamber lay buried deep within the Callanius’ spine, far below the viewing decks and command tiers, where the ship’s heart thrummed against the void. Here, the walls sweated condensation. Pipes wove like arteries overhead. The air hummed with the low pulse of the Veil-core far below — a sound almost too low to be heard and too present to ignore.

The room smelled of machine oil and ceremonial resin. Shadows clung to the rivets. It was too cold for the living, too alive for the dead.

At its center stood a sarcophagus that was no coffin any sane person would build. But only a grieving Warlord of the Dominion would do everything in his power. Bone and metal fused into a single monstrous form. Veins of glass tubing and masses of wires coiled from it in bundles, disappearing into the floor and walls. They twitched with pulses of dim violet, their fluid thick as blood. Dozens of monitoring spires bloomed around it, some chittering in clicks no human throat could make, others humming in tones that made teeth itch.

The whole construct lived for another to live — a machine that breathed, a corpse that dreamed.

The doors hissed open.

Kael entered carrying Sorilla in his arms. It had been less than two days. He had ordered the Engineers to make this device, but when they refused, he had made it himself — and they had understood.

Her armor was cleaned of battlefield filth, the silver bright again, the gold clasps polished. Her braids were combed and fell across his forearm like the weight of promises they had never had time to keep. Her face was pale now, the warmth leached away, but there was still something in it — a presence hovering at the far edge of breath.

The Engineers lining the walls bowed their heads as he passed, whispering machine prayers through grated masks. None met his eyes. They knew what he had done. They knew what he was about to do.

Kael stepped to the sarcophagus and lowered her into it as if afraid she might break. The conduits hissed and shifted. The machines leaned forward in their cages. As her back touched the lined metal and bone, the entire room exhaled — a slow, collective thrum that crawled into the soles of his feet.

He stayed bent over her for a long time. He brushed a stray hair from her cheek, wiped a last trace of dust from the curve of her jaw. His thumb lingered against her lips, remembering the shape of her voice. The monitors blinked and shifted as they found something in her stillness — not a heartbeat, not a breath, but something — and clung to it like scavengers to scraps.

“She hangs,” one of the Engineers whispered without meaning to. “Between.”

Kael did not answer. He knew where she was: on the blade-edge between life and death, a place no soul was meant to linger. He knew the power keeping her there flowed from the Veil-core itself, drawn up through channels the Engineers had sworn they would never build. He knew that if he stepped closer, he could feel her there, faint as a memory one could not quite recall.

He bent low, so close that his breath fogged the cold surface of her cheek. “I will not leave you here,” he murmured. “I will bring you back. Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs.” His hand lay on her cheek, remembering what it had been like to feel her smile against it.

Her eyes did not open. Her chest did not rise. But for a heartbeat, the hum of the core deep below the ship aligned with the beat of his pulse, and the monitors stuttered as if something inside the coffin stirred.

Kael straightened. His hands hovered over the edge of the sarcophagus longer than he had meant them to, fingers twitching. He set his palm flat on the lid. “Seal it,” he said.

The bonesteel shifted. Bands closed over her body like ribs over a heart. Conduits slid into ports with wet, sucking clicks. The final plate ground into place with a hiss that sounded far too much like a sigh. Lights along the monitoring spires spiked, then leveled. The hum deepened.

A hooded Engineer older than the rest approached Kael.
“We retrieved her blood as you requested. It will be bound with yours. You are still sure you wish us to make them?” the Engineer said with as much warmth as a machine could have.
“Yes, thank you, Alkamenes,” Kael said with solemn breath.

A panel in the far wall shuddered and began to descend. The sarcophagus slid behind it as if swallowed by the ship itself. In seconds, the chamber was empty but for the faint ring of monitoring instruments and the lingering scent of resin and oil.

Kael stood there long after the wall sealed. His head bowed. His shoulders shook once, violently, before stilling. Something in him closed — not healed, not whole, just locked. When he finally turned toward the door, the grief on his face had hardened into something colder, sharper.

“I will find a way,” he whispered — maybe to her, maybe to himself. “I will burn the stars to bring you home.”

The door slid shut behind him. The hum of the Veil-core thrummed on, steady and patient, as if it too were listening.