The smell of cigar filled the air.
The smoke rose in slow spirals, passing through the half-open window of the vehicle as though it were in a hurry to escape — more hurry than any of us in there. The flying car where I was seated was the largest I had ever seen: not only tall and wide, but long, the kind that carried more importance than passengers. Even seated comfortably in a corner — and it was genuinely comfortable, with upholstery that seemed made to absorb the weight of decisions, not just bodies — I could still see five other people accommodated without anyone invading the other's space. There was a table between the benches. Screens embedded in the armrests. A bar in the back that nobody touched.
But the comfort didn't ease the discomfort of what I was hearing.
Despite understanding on the surface what was happening, things were incredibly complex in essence — and what they had told me in the last minutes was incredibly hard to believe. But it had also been the only reason I got into that car in the first place. Not for the scale, not for the gravity, but for the fact that information of that level seemed to be unknown to everyone. Everyone. The entire planet. Billions of people living their lives without knowing that the ground beneath them was about to open.
"You mean we're really on the verge of a conflict with the Infernals?"
The question came out with more incredulity than I intended. Everyone in the car seemed to want to speak — mouths that opened and closed, gazes that crossed seeking permission — but in the end they just watched. The eyes went to the back of the vehicle, to the opposite side from where I was, where an old man calmly smoked what remained of his cigar while observing the horizon passing through the window.
The patriarch of the Unicorn family.
His violet eyes were clearly lost in many things — layers of concern stacked one upon the other, each heavier than the last, and all hidden behind that curtain of smoke he exhaled with the rehearsed calm of someone who learned to seem tranquil when the world burns. I knew he knew more than he had said. The kind of person who tells you enough to frighten you and keeps the rest for when you're ready.
I wasn't ready.
But time didn't ask.
"This." He tossed the rest of the cigar out the window and closed it. The glass sealed with a soft hiss, and the silence that remained was heavier than any smoke. "The truth is that this information hasn't yet reached this quadrant." The violet eyes finally unstuck from the horizon and found mine. "Perhaps you understand that talking about this subject doesn't solve anything. In truth, it only creates panic."
He paused. Not dramatically — functionally. The kind of pause that precedes information that changes the world of whoever hears it.
"The attack began a few months ago. We've already lost five station-planets and the planet Hermes."He said it the way one lists items on an invoice — a coldness I knew was shell, not essence. "Honestly, we don't know exactly what they want with this. But we know that Inora had prohibited any military action against humans." His fingers interlaced over his lap. "But they ignored the warning."
The old man let out a long sigh. And while the air left his lungs, I saw something that disturbed me more than any words: he seemed to age forty years in a few seconds. The wrinkles deepened. The shoulders descended. The light in the violet eyes grew dimmer, as though the energy needed to maintain the façade of composure had been diverted elsewhere — the place where he processed the weight of being responsible for billions of lives that didn't know they were in danger.
"Unfortunately, despite having technology, they still have the advantage in ground combat." His voice hardened. "When the Infernals enter a planet, they're unbeatable."
Unbeatable. The word should have frightened me more than it did — and the fact that it didn't said something about what the Oasis had done to me.
✦ ✦ ✦
The patriarch looked at me for a few seconds before continuing. And when he spoke, the voice had changed — it was no longer the commander informing, it was the curious old man.
"I must admit I was surprised to learn that someone as strong as the person my daughter recognized was from one of the farms in my quadrant." The corner of his mouth rose. "Do you know how rare it is for someone to tame a Yokai queen?" The violet eyes shone with something resembling nostalgia. "Honestly, I had only seen it once, many years ago. Formidable creatures. You know, I was about your age when I saw the first Yokai. Of course, back then being a pioneer was always something—"
A dry cough cut the sentence.
The woman seated beside him — whom until that moment I had confused with a secretary — coughed with the surgical precision of someone who interrupts without seeming rude, but with every intention of interrupting.
"Sorry, Rose…" The old man let out an irritated grunt. "Argh. Anyway. As I said before: we are in danger."
Yes.
I would never have gotten into that vehicle if it weren't to protect what was important to me. Honestly, I intended to spend some time with my sister. The list of things I needed to do was clear: buy a territory transfer item, return to the Oasis, reposition Sparta, keep growing. The problem was that Oasis items — any Oasis item — were not only rare but coveted by the world's elite. I wasn't naive enough to believe I would find the item easily, even being one that brought more harm than benefit. The nobles preferred to keep them in stock for emergencies, because being transported to a random and dangerous place was still better than dying where you were. Tomorrow always generated a new opportunity.
But tomorrow, according to the old man smoking cigars, had just gotten much shorter.
"What do you think they're so actively looking for? I mean, shouldn't they be worried about their neighbors?"
The question seemed to pull a trigger.
Everyone in the car looked — not at the old man, but at the woman beside him. Rose. She was fiddling with what seemed to be a thin, dark tablet, her fingers sliding across the surface with the speed of someone who processes information in real time while listening to everything around her. My question made the others observe her, and she finally lowered the tablet.
Her eyes found mine for the first time.
And I almost lost my breath.
Not from beauty — though there was beauty. It was the eyes. Heterochromatic: one a deep violet, like the patriarch's, and the other black, so dark the pupil was lost in the iris like a stone at the bottom of a well without light. The face was serious — permanently serious, with the expression of someone always doing one thing while thinking about three others. But there was urgency there too, a constant concern vibrating beneath the surface like a string stretched too tight.
"You can tell him, Rose." The patriarch placed his hand over her wrist with the gentleness of someone calming a person who didn't ask to be calmed. "If the other elders say anything, tell them it was I who permitted it."
Rose's eyes softened for a fraction — and she picked up the tablet again.
The vehicle's windows began to darken. All at the same time, like eyelids closing. And from the center of the ceiling, a holographic image projected in the air between us — spinning slowly, shining with points of light I recognized the instant I saw them.
Stars.
Our quadrant.
I could identify it just by looking — anyone who looked at the night sky with enough attention could connect the dots. The familiar constellations, the irregular shape of the galactic arm where we existed, the empty spaces I knew were empty because they had always been empty.
"This is—"
"Our quadrant." Rose cut me off with the efficiency of someone who has no patience for incomplete sentences. "Yes. In truth, here you'll find not only our quadrant, but also the great expansion of a hundred, fifty, and thirty years ago."
The image adjusted. Lines lit up — expansion routes, traced in different colors for each period, extending like roots of a tree trying to find fertile ground in a desert.
Our universe had always been described as an infertile periphery.
It wasn't modesty. It was fact. We lived in a vast space where almost nothing survived around us. Most races in the universe preferred dense systems — regions where a single star fed three, four habitable planets, where life sprouted with the ease of weeds in good soil. Rich systems. Contested systems. Systems worth wars.
Ours was worth nothing.
Our quadrant was, in simple words, like a branch about to fall from a tree full of fruit. Dry. Peripheral. Ignored by the greater races not out of generosity, but out of contempt — the kind of contempt that comes from looking at something and deciding it's not worth the effort to take.
And it was exactly that contempt that saved us.
Something singular happened with our species: we expanded more than any other race in distance, but fell far behind in planets. The Oasis helped — it brought technology that allowed terraforming part of our quadrant, transforming dead rocks into breathable worlds. But even so, our settlements were scattered across nearly ten light-years of influence, separated by distances that transformed any call for help into a wait of months, sometimes years.
It was our Achilles' heel.
But it had also been our luck. The universe had no interest in our space because it found it rotten — and we sucked it down to the core of what was possible, growing slowly, in silence, without drawing attention.
Until now.
"But what does our quadrant have to do with this?"
Rose began to manipulate the hologram. The quadrant spun, grew, and moved to the left — crossing voids and systems I didn't know until it finally stopped on a planet I recognized by color before recognizing by name.
Red.
Red like dried blood. Red like old embers. A planet that seemed to have been forged inside a star and spat out before cooling.
"Kazandu."
The name left my mouth before I decided to say it. One of the most ancient planets of the Infernals. Alongside Cacri, one of the greatest centers of influence and power of that race. A planet that carried millennia of history, of war, of accumulated power — the kind of place entire civilizations orbited without daring to touch.
"Very well." Rose confirmed, the heterochromatic eyes fixed on mine. "The problem is that, as you can see, we share a border with Kazandu."
I could see. On the hologram, the distance between human territory and Kazandu's orbit of influence was thin — uncomfortably thin, like a paper wall separating two rooms where very different things happened.
But even understanding what she was saying, something didn't fit. Kazandu was a perfect planet for the Infernals — it was already theirs, already strong, already everything they needed. And honestly, I couldn't imagine any planet in those conditions anywhere else in our territory. Kazandu was a planet full of volcanoes, as though it were still a new world in formation — magma running on the surface, constant heat, the kind of environment the Infernals didn't merely tolerate but needed. However, everything in our universe was the opposite. Ancient. Cold. Frozen. Rocky planets of glass or ice — that was what existed on our side. An Infernal trying to live here would be like throwing an ember into snow and expecting it to keep burning.
I couldn't see the reason why they would expand into human territory. Our space was scarce. The options around them were infinitely more advantageous. It made no strategic sense. No territorial sense. No sense at all.
The patriarch took the floor. The voice had returned to the tone of someone who measures each syllable.
"Very well. Actually, I think he already has enough knowledge. Let's get to the point." He looked at me with something resembling reluctant approval — the kind from someone who expected to have to explain and discovered they didn't need to. "My daughter said you were very intelligent. I must admit I doubted it." The violet eyes fixed on a point of the hologram. "The problem is right here."
His finger pointed at one of Kazandu's moons.
A moon. Small. Almost irrelevant on the map — the kind of celestial body any cartographer would place as a footnote, not as a highlight.
He saw my face of confusion.
Rose spoke again. This time, what she showed was no longer the star map — it was a recording. The image trembled before stabilizing, showing the interior of something I recognized as the bridge of a ship.
"This happened three months ago." Her voice was lower now — the tone of someone who tells something they haven't yet learned to tell without feeling it. "This ship is a matriarchal vessel of a family I think you might know. At least one of its members was part of your group of juniors." A minimal pause. "Bloodline."
The name struck me like the sound of rattling and teeth clashing.
I knew what had happened to the noble Jasmine Bloodline. The horrible fate — transformed into a wendigo, then killed. It wasn't her I remembered with most intensity. It was the sister. Her face. Her voice. The threat she had made with eyes that promised something words didn't need to say. My blood boiled by reflex — the DNA mixture acting again, making me more irritable with memories that should be buried.
"Yes. I knew her. And the sister too."
The eyes of everyone in the vehicle widened for an instant — the surprise of hearing a colonist confirm contact with one of the most influential noble families of the sector — but the subject returned to what really mattered.
The recording came to life.
The bridge of a stationary ship. Officers at their posts. Screens blinking with routine data. The kind of professional calm that exists before something very bad happens — and that, in the recording, had the weight of a countdown nobody knew was running.
And then the flash.
The entire screen lit up. The officers' faces turned toward the front windows — and what I saw in those faces, frozen by the camera at the exact instant of impact, was something I knew. Not surprise. Not fear. Incomprehension. The expression of someone seeing something the brain refuses to process because it has no category for it.
The recording cut.
Suddenly. Without transition. As though someone had ripped the power cable from the universe.
"Unfortunately, the external footage was corrupted at the moment of the flash." Rose said, her voice controlled, but her fingers gripping the tablet too tightly. "It wasn't possible to identify what happened on the outside." She paused for too long for it to be technical. "However, what we know is that this ship was found empty. With nobody aboard."
Empty.
An entire matriarchal ship. Full crew. Officers, soldiers, technicians — hundreds of people.
Empty.
"And it was found near the Travellers' territory."
Rose pulled up the map again. The hologram navigated between stars, crossed quadrants, passed through systems I didn't know — and stopped on the completely opposite side of the map. The distance between Kazandu and the point where the ship was found was absurd.
"The contact we had from the Travellers about the detection of the empty ship happened a few hours after the flash."
My brain processed the information.
And locked up.
Hours. A few hours. The Travellers' quadrant was tens of light-years away. The exact point where the ship was found was nearly a hundred light-years from where it had originally been. A hundred light-years covered in hours. Not in generations, not in decades, not with the warp technology the most advanced races used and that even then took months to cover fractions of that distance.
Hours.
"Wait." My mouth went dry. "What are you trying to say? They left where they were and were transported a hundred light-years in a matter of hours?" I heard my own voice rise without being able to control it. "Are you saying they found a wormhole?"
Silence reigned in the car.
Rose seemed anxious to continue, her lips moving over words that didn't come out. But the patriarch placed his hand over her wrist again — and this time the gesture wasn't gentle. It was containment. The gesture of someone who knows what comes next needs to be delivered the right way, because the wrong way breaks whoever hears it.
"Yes." The patriarch said, the word falling in the air like a stone. "However, what happened afterward was what surprised us."
He changed the image. A different ship appeared — larger, older, with markings I didn't recognize, but that the patriarch looked at with the familiarity of someone who knows every rivet.
"This ship is my mother ship. I asked them to go verify what that light was. To bring answers." The violet eyes fixed on mine. "Well. They arrived."
The image changed.
And what appeared on the screen was a void.
Black. Absolute. Without stars, without dust, without the residual glow that always exists even in the darkest corners of space. Just nothing — the kind of nothing that isn't absence, it's negative presence, as though something that should be there had been removed and the universe hadn't yet decided what to put in its place.
"I don't see anything." I said, and my voice sounded smaller than I wanted. "Where's the planet?"
The patriarch stopped.
He looked at something that wasn't on the screen — something inside him, something he visited when he needed strength to say what he didn't want to say. The silence stretched for seconds that felt like minutes.
Rose broke.
"The planet vanished."
The words fell into the vehicle like something alive — and stayed there, taking up space, breathing, waiting for someone to have the courage to react to them.
Nobody did.
"What do you mean vanished?"
My voice came out hoarse. Tight. With the tone of someone asking for someone to say it's a lie, it's a mistake, it's anything that isn't what it seems.
The patriarch answered. Slowly. With the care of someone depositing a bomb in another's lap and needing it not to explode before its time.
"The planet Kazandu didn't disappear entirely." Each word measured. Each syllable heavy. "In truth, it was, somehow… transported."
Transported.
A planet.
An entire planet — with its mass, with its gravity, with its billions of tons of rock and iron and fire — ripped from where it was and moved to another place the way you move a piece on a board. The technology needed for something like that didn't exist. Shouldn't exist. Couldn't exist — not in the universe I knew, not in the laws I understood, not in any scenario any race, however advanced, had even theorized.
"And the place where it appeared…" The patriarch closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, the violet was darker. "…was here. In our quadrant."
The pieces began to fit together.
One by one. With the slow and irreversible precision of a machine assembling something you don't want to see assembled.
The Infernals had, somehow, transported their planet. The most powerful planet they possessed — Kazandu, the fortress, the cradle of war, the center of millennia of accumulated power — moved through light-years of space and deposited in the only place in the universe nobody thought was worth defending.
Human territory.
It was perfect.
For them, it was perfect. The Infernals had never been an expansionist race — they were simple, territorial, the kind of civilization that preferred to deepen what it had rather than seek what it didn't. But they had always lived surrounded. Compressed between races that competed for the same space, sharing even a planet with another race that threatened them. The pressure was constant. The space, insufficient.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, someone had given them the tool to solve everything at once: take the planet and leave. To a vast place. Empty. Despised. Where the strongest neighbor was a race the entire universe considered insignificant.
Us.
While my mind processed the implications — and each implication was worse than the last — I finally caught on to the word the patriarch had used.
"Wait." My mouth went truly dry. The kind of dry that comes from within, that saliva doesn't solve. "What do you mean our quadrant?"
Rose didn't bother to hold back.
The image on the hologram changed one last time. The quadrant contracted, spun, plunged — and stopped on a system I knew better than any other. The system where I was born. Where I grew up. Where my sister slept every night wondering whether I would return.
"Our solar system."
My world sank.
The enemy wasn't billions of kilometers away. Wasn't on the other side of the quadrant. Wasn't separated by light-years of void and time and distance that would transform any attack into a project of decades.
It was there.
Close enough that an attack wasn't a matter of planning — it was a matter of will. At any moment. Without warning. Without reaction time. Without the distance that had always been the only real protection humans possessed.
I thought of Helena.
Alone on the farm. With four Shih Tzus and a new house and a world that didn't know it was about to discover that the cosmic solitude that had always protected us had just become a trap.
I thought of my room. Of the car. Of the empty bakery. Of everything that was small and fragile and mine.
"But what about the other families?" The question came out with the urgency of someone looking for an exit they know doesn't exist. "I mean, the other human sectors—"
I saw the face of everyone in the vehicle lower.
Benfior. Cuper. Alexandra — who had regained consciousness at some point and was now seated in a corner with the posture of someone who had learned a lesson that would hurt for a long time. All with their heads bowed. A mixture of rage and shame stamped on every face — the rage of those who know they're alone and the shame of knowing they were too weak for what was coming.
I didn't need them to answer.
"We're alone, aren't we?"
It wasn't hard to reach that conclusion.
One of the disadvantages of colonizing in such a scattered fashion was that each planet and human sector had its own chains of influence — families, hierarchies, power structures that answered only to themselves. There was no central government, at least not in practice. No permanent alliance. Nothing that resembled unity, because unity required proximity and proximity was the only thing humans never had.
In the end, the universe for humans had become an every-man-for-himself.
The patriarch spoke. His voice, this time, had no coldness. No shell. It was the raw voice of an old man who carried on his back the weight of an entire sector and who was asking for help the only way he knew: offering something in exchange.
"Despite not yet having been attacked directly on our home planets, there will be an invasion at some point." The violet eyes found mine — and this time there was no cigar, no shell, nothing between the question and the truth. "If you accept to help us, we can transfer your sister to one of my ships and keep her far from this sector while we fight for her."
Helena.
Her name — the reason I had entered the Oasis, the reason I had killed and bled and built and lost — was now a bargaining chip. Not out of cruelty. Out of necessity. The patriarch was telling me, between the lines, that my sister would be safe if I fought. That the price of her safety was my war.
I looked at each face in the vehicle.
Benfior, with his scales shining faintly, eyes on the floor. Cuper, the diluted feline, with his hands pressed over his knees. Alexandra, leaning against the seat with her body still trembling from the lightning, her eyes avoiding mine. Rose, with her tablet pressed against her chest like a shield, the heterochromatic eyes fixed on me with something I couldn't classify — hope, perhaps, or the fear that I would say no.
And the patriarch. The old man with violet eyes. Cigar smoker. Father of a daughter I had saved. Lord of a quadrant about to become a battlefield.
I thought of Morgana. Of Livina. Of Zaridan and every creature I had left behind on a gray plain waiting for me to return.
I thought of the promise I made.
"I'll wait for you."
Morgana's voice echoed in my head as though she were there — and in a way she was, because promises truly made don't stay in the place where they were said; they follow whoever made them until they are fulfilled or broken.
I breathed deep.
"So it's war?"
The patriarch looked at me.
And for the first time since I got into that vehicle, he hid nothing. The exhaustion. The fear. The determination that comes from someone who has already decided they will fight even knowing they might lose. All there, exposed, on a face that had spent the entire conversation protecting itself behind cigars and pauses and measured sentences.
"Yes." The word came out like the last piece of a puzzle nobody wanted to assemble. "War."