The transition from the quantum lane's blue shimmer to the stark reality of the Vael system was like stepping from a cathedral into a charnel house. One moment, the Argosy sailed through structured nothingness; the next, it hung in a tomb of cosmic ruin.
Vael Prime, the system's star, dominated the view. It was not the gentle yellow of Sol or the steady amethyst of Xylar's sun. It was a swollen, angry ember, pulsating a sickly crimson light that stained the surrounding void. It was a star in the terminal stages of its life, yet Cinder's initial scans revealed the terrifying truth: its rapid decay signature was laced with isotopic markers consistent with artificial stellar destabilization. Someone had given a dying star a violent, final push.
And there, orbiting this heart of fire, was Aevaria.
Lily's breath caught. From a distance, it was breathtaking. A world of delicate white and silver, like a frosted jewel. As the Argosy moved into a high, cautious orbit, the details resolved, and the breathtaking beauty curdled into profound horror.
The white was not snow or cloud. It was a planet-spanning forest of crystalline structures—trees, towers, vast, intricate lattices—all frozen in flawless, transparent silicate. They caught the bloody light of Vael Prime and fractured it into a million mournful rainbows. It was a garden of glass, a fossilized symphony. There were no cities as Xylar understood them, but the entire planetary surface was a single, petrified monument to an extinct art form.
"No impact craters," Zark murmured, his eyes fixed on the tactical displays. "No evidence of tectonic collapse from natural stellar expansion. The petrification is uniform, instantaneous from a planetary scale perspective. This was not a natural disaster. It was an act of precision extermination."
The Aevarian echo in the Veridian Weave, which had been a constant, low thrum, now swelled into a deafening chorus. But it was a chorus of ghosts. The pain was no longer a distant signal; it was the atmosphere itself. Lily gasped, her knees buckling. She was inundated with a sensory overload of death: not the violent death of battle, but the slow, terrible silence of a song that had been cut off mid-note, frozen forever in a scream of sublimating sap and shattering crystal.
Zark was beside her in an instant, his hands on her shoulders, pouring stabilizing energy through the bond. "Shields! Raise your mental shields, Lily! Do not open yourself to it fully. It is a psychic minefield."
"It's… everywhere," she choked out, tears streaming down her face. "They're all still here. Trapped. Feeling the moment of their death over and over." The horror was existential. The Aevarians hadn't just died; their collective consciousness had been flash-fried into the very matter of their world.
Cinder's voice, cool and clinical, cut through the psychic fog. "Scanning for energy signatures. Detecting one concentrated anomalous reading. It is not Vrax in origin. It is… Aevarian. Faint, but coherent. Fluctuating in a pattern consistent with a sustained, low-level psionic broadcast—the source of the echo. Coordinates locked. Additionally, detecting multiple Vrax-class signatures in high orbit on the far side of the third moon. They have not yet detected us; our stealth field is holding."
"The Seed," Lily whispered, pushing through the grief to focus on that one coherent signal. "The 'Root of Song.' It's down there. It's alive."
"And Vrax is here, watching," Zark said, his expression granite. "He is not digging among the ruins. He is waiting. This is a trap. But the bait is real."
The choice was impossible. A live Aevarian consciousness was a miracle, a responsibility. To leave it was unthinkable. To go after it was to walk into Vrax's crosshairs.
"We have to try," Lily said, her voice finding strength in the sheer moral clarity of it. "We can't leave the last note of their song to him. We take the Argosy's stealth shuttle. In and out. Fast. We retrieve the Seed and jump before his fleet can react."
"He will have the planet monitored," Kaelen's voice came through the comm from the bridge. "The moment you break atmosphere, he will know."
"Then we give him a distraction," Zark said, a plan forming with lightning speed. "Cinder, prepare the Argosy's long-range lance battery. Target the third moon. Not to destroy, but to graze its surface. Create a significant thermal and electromagnetic pulse. Time it for our shuttle's maximum atmospheric entry noise. Let Vrax think we are clumsy, announcing our presence with a failed sniper shot. His focus will be on the Argosy's location, not on a silent shuttle already in the dead zone of his planetary scans."
It was a risk. It would reveal the Argosy's position. But it was the only play.
The stealth shuttle, a sleek, black teardrop, detached from the mothership and fell silently toward the glittering, dead world. Lily piloted, her hands steady on the controls, her mind partially shielded but still achingly open to the dirge of Aevaria. Zark sat beside her, a contained star of focused readiness.
They pierced the thin, crystalline atmosphere. The view from below was even more devastating. The petrified forest stretched to every horizon, an infinite sculpture garden of agony. Here and there, they saw what must have been Aevarians themselves—tall, graceful silhouettes of fused crystal, caught in poses of reaching, of embracing, of falling. It was a snapshot of apocalypse.
The shuttle followed Cinder's coordinates to a location near what might have been a planetary pole—a vast, frozen basin. In its center was the only thing that wasn't transparent. A mound of dark, rich, living soil, maybe a hundred meters across. And at its heart, a single, towering structure. It was the stump of a tree, but one made of woven, iridescent wood and shimmering, metallic bark. It was badly damaged, scarred by blackened burns that radiated a hateful, familiar energy signature—Shatterpoint residue. But at its base, cradled by thick roots that glowed with a soft, internal green-gold light, was a pulsating pod about the size of Lily's torso. The Seed.
As the shuttle set down on the silent, glassy plain, the chorus in Lily's mind shifted. The overwhelming grief of the planet pulled back, like a tide receding from a single, defended shore. From the wounded World-Tree stump, a new voice emerged. It was thin, frayed, but luminously clear.
You came… You of the New Song… the Weavers of Verdant Light… He is the Poisoner… He seeks the Last Note to complete his Silence…
Lily didn't hear words. She saw-feel-tasted concepts: Vrax as a blot of consuming nothingness, his hunters as scalpels of discord, the Seed as a compacted symphony containing the blueprint for Aevarian life, their music, their essence.
"We are here for the Seed," Lily projected back, pushing her intention through the Weave, letting it carry her sincerity. "We will take it to safety."
Take… and listen … The Song must not end with the Singer… Plant it in a heart of starlight and soil… Let it dream a new dream…
A wave of profound, grateful sorrow washed over them, followed by a pulse of urgent warning. He comes… The Poisoner feels the change in the Song…
At that moment, Cinder's voice crackled in their helmets. "Distraction launched. Impact on the moon in 15 seconds. Vrax fleet is responding, turning toward the Argosy's last known position. You have a window. But be advised, I am detecting a massive energy build-up from the lead Vrax dreadnought. Signature matches a theoretical super-weapon class. It is targeting the moon."
"Targeting the moon? Why?" Zark snapped.
The answer came not from Cinder, but from the planet itself. The Aevarian consciousness sent a final, terrified image: the World-Singer weapon not as a planet-killer, but as a resonance tool. Vrax wasn't just testing its destructive power here. He was using the dead Aevarian bio-crystal network—the entire planet—as a gigantic sounding board. He was going to shatter the moon, and use the catastrophic psionic feedback wave through the petrified chorus to harvest the last coherent energy—the Seed's—by force.
"He's going to blast the Seed out of the tree!" Lily cried.
They burst from the shuttle and sprinted across the brittle ground. The air was cold and still, smelling of ozone and old, sweet decay. As they reached the mound of soil, the ground felt warm, vibrating with a feeble, living hum. The Seed pulsed in time with Lily's heartbeat.
"Get it! I'll cover you!" Zark yelled, turning to face the sky, his hands already glowing as he prepared defensive barriers.
Lily scrambled up the roots. The Seed pod was warm to the touch, its surface smooth and resilient. As her hands closed around it, a final, powerful transmission flooded her, bypassing her shields. It was the complete Song of the Aevarians—not a history, but a feeling. The joy of photosynthesis, the complex harmony of root-communication, the beautiful, slow mathematics of growth, the collective dream of a world that was one mind. It was a gift, and a burden. A whole civilization's memory entrusted to her.
She heaved the Seed into her arms. It was lighter than it looked, humming with potential life.
A shadow fell across them. Not from the sky, but from the edge of the crystalline forest. A squad of Vrax's hunter-knights, clad in scarred black armor, stepped from behind the petrified trunks. They had been lying in wait, planet-side. The leader's visor glowed crimson.
"The Overseer delivers the Conduit and the prize," a synthesized voice grated. "Lord Vrax will be pleased."
Zark didn't waste energy on a retort. He unleashed a focused beam of white-hot energy, not at the hunters, but at the glassy ground at their feet. The super-heated crystal exploded into shrapnel and steam, creating a momentary screen.
"GO!" he roared.
Lily turned to run, clutching the Seed. As she did, the Aevarian consciousness gave one last, desperate push. The roots around the stump writhed, not with motion, but with a final surge of energy. They wrapped around Lily's ankles not to hold her, but to transfer. A jolt of pure, verdant life-force—the Tree's last—shot into her. It was a boost, a blessing, and a goodbye. The glow in the roots died completely, turning ashen and inert.
Then, the sky ignited.
From high orbit, a beam of impossible darkness, rimmed with hellish violet energy, lanced down. It didn't strike Aevaria. It struck its moon. For a split second, nothing happened. Then, the moon—a body a quarter the size of Earth's—disintegrated. It didn't explode outward. It seemed to vibrate at a frequency that unraveled its very atomic bonds, dissolving into a expanding cloud of glittering, silent dust.
The psychic shockwave hit Aevaria a millisecond later.
It was a wall of silent, psychic nullity. A anti-song. Where it touched the petrified chorus, the beautiful, frozen crystals didn't shatter; they dissipated, turning to fine, mournful sand that fell in slow motion. The wave rushed across the planetary surface toward their location.
The hunters, caught in the open, had just enough time to look up before the wave hit them. Their armored forms didn't crumple; they simply… stopped. Lights died. They toppled over, empty shells.
Zark threw every ounce of his power into a protective dome around himself and Lily. The null-wave hit it. The sound was the tearing of reality. Zark's barrier, designed to deflect energy, struggled against this erasure of information, this un-creation. He grunted, sinking to one knee, veins of golden light standing out on his neck.
Inside the dome, Lily felt it too—a terrible, sucking silence trying to invade her mind, to unmake the Aevarian Song now held within her and the Seed. She clung to the Seed, and to the Veridian Weave, pouring her own will, amplified by the Tree's last gift, back into Zark. She became an anchor of life, of memory, against the tide of oblivion.
The wave passed.
The dome flickered and fell. Around them, the crystalline forest for kilometers was gone, reduced to a flat, featureless plain of white dust. Only the small mound of soil and the dead stump remained, an island in a sea of nothing.
Zark was breathing heavily, his energy field dim. Lily still held the humming Seed. They were alive.
From the shuttle's comm, Cinder's voice was urgent. "The World-Singer weapon is recharging. Vrax's fleet is now fully aware of your location. The Argosy is engaging to draw fire. You must extract NOW."
They ran back to the shuttle, the dust of a dead world and a dead moon settling on their shoulders like the ashes of a galaxy. They had the Seed. They had witnessed the true, horrifying scale of Vrax's new power. He wasn't just a rival CEO. He was an exterminator of worlds, a composer of silence.
As the shuttle screamed back toward the Argosy, leaving the Garden of Bone to its final, dusty quiet, Lily held the last dream of the Aevarians in her arms. The victory felt hollow, baptized in cosmic dust and echoing with the silence of a shattered moon. They had saved a seed, but they had seen the scythe. And the reaper was turning his gaze toward the rest of the living galaxy.