Some say demons are forged in hatred. Others, born in darkness. But what if "Some say demons are forged in hatred. Others, born in darkness. But what if they are something far worse—shadows that defy all reason? What if someone invited them? Some wear masks of innocence, hiding in plain sight. Others carve a path of death, leaving behind only silence and blood."
Anonymous broadcast from future
I still remember that day—the day everything changed in just 24 hours.
A whole continent—swallowed by chaos, fire, and blood. One moment, the sky was calm, the next, it was filled with shrieks and the roars of monsters no one had ever imagined.
You must be wondering who I am, the voice speaking now through the crackle of this broadcast. I am the one who invited them into this world—the ones you call monsters. But they are far from monsters. Predators? That word does them a disservice. They are gods of death.
For 24 hours, they tore through everything. Entire bio-cities disintegrated into primal energy. Complex flow-grids that powered continents vaporized. Then—they were gone. Vanished. Without a single detectable quantum signature, no residual graviton-wake. Like they were never here. But some say… they are still close—lurking beyond the veil of known dimensions, just past the threshold of perception. Close enough to unravel your mind with a single whisper of displaced energy, a mere brush of their alien consciousness.
Present day
Have you ever stood beneath three suns—Zyren, Kaelen, and Virellia—and still seen shadows colder than vacuum?
Shadows that cling to the very edges of your neural perception, whispering of forces beyond comprehension?
That's Kewaa. Our world.
Shaped by the complex interplay of stellar radiation, by the deep, resonant currents of planetary flow energy, and by secrets older than recorded history, woven into the very bedrock of our existence.
The year is 2237 of the Zyreni Stellar Cycle.
The Vael'Suun hadn't sent delegates since the collapse of the Zyneris Accord, but even their distant orbital stations must have registered the faint, temporal ripples in the sector.
We no longer rely on inefficient, combustion-driven machines or primitive atomic fission.
We command flow energy—a highly structured, semi-living bio-energetic force drawn from the very stars that cradle us, from the incandescent planetary mantle beneath our cities, and from the intricate neural pathways beneath our own skin.
Our cities don't merely stand; they breathe.
Their crystalline towers are not static; they are living structures that reshape themselves, their flow-conduits shifting and reconfiguring based on communal need or direct neural directive.
Our transport isn't bound by fixed paths or archaic rails; it rides invisible graviton threads that hum with controlled resonance in the air above our sky-lanes, allowing silent, frictionless travel across continents.
Our homes don't just house us; they sing back when we speak, their bio-luminescent walls responding to our neural impulses.
Their internal environments shift to our precise comfort parameters, their surfaces sometimes displaying complex emotional light-patterns only visible to the family unit.
Even the ambient light of the Solaris Collective beyond our system felt distant, a hum on the edge of awareness, a faint whisper of other civilizations.
But we're not one people. We never were.
Kewaa is shared by six intelligent species, each born under the unique evolutionary pressures of different solar spectrums and planetary biomes.
Some, like the Aetheria, glide with wings of crystalline silica, their bodies refracting ambient light into dazzling trails as they navigate the upper atmosphere.
Some, the Umbrals, whisper to shadows, their forms composed of mutable dark matter, capable of precise localized density shifts for stealth or traversal through solid matter.
Some, the Ignis, burn with contained plasma, their forms a constant dance of living solar flame, their very presence radiating gentle warmth.
And some, like my kind, the Nirreni, thread thoughts through light and crystal, our very veins pulsing with controlled flow, our crystalline pupils attuned to the subtlest energy fluctuations.
We live in uneasy symbiosis, forged by treaties and shared flow-networks, always aware of the vastness of the cosmos beyond our pale.
And yet, here we are. Together. Progress built on shared flow-networks that connect our minds and our cities.
Power consolidated through complex political matrices that shift like tectonic plates. And behind it all—secrets.
Layered like geological strata within the planet's deepest core, waiting to be unearthed, holding within them the weight of ages.
Tonight, in Zavren City's Sky Palace, the three suns—Zyren, the golden radiant, casting a warm, familiar embrace; Kaelen, the blinding white furnace, a sharp, cleansing brilliance; and Virellia, the faint, shimmering Wraith Sun that only appears when energy flows bend too far, a spectral, unsettling presence—watched a celebration unfold.
Their combined light bathed the spires of Zavren in a soft, ethereal glow, painting long, fluid shadows across the city's highest, most pristine platforms.
A subtle tremor ran through the palace's flow-crystal foundation, almost imperceptible, a mere whisper of disquiet.
Arron Kael stood unnaturally still, his back to the crystalline crowd that rippled like a sea of refracted light behind him, each form a unique interplay of bio-luminescence and polished surface.
His thoughts, usually as calm and ordered as a Nirreni schematic, felt like fractured crystal shards tonight.
The panoramic balcony overlooked the silver-glass towers of Zavren. Their intricate flow-conduits spiraled upward, not just as conduits, but as organic extensions of the city's nervous system, like constellations made real.
Fine flow threads danced around him, a subtle electromagnetic signature visible only to the Nirreni—his kind—their crystalline pupils attuned to energy.
He breathed them in—not air, but structured energy itself, a subtle current that eased the tension in his core.
It calmed him. Centered him. Allowed him to watch, observe, process.
His energy-threaded veins, a faint, almost imperceptible silver filigree beneath his skin, pulsed in rhythm with the ambient flow, a silent, intimate connection to the city's vast power grid.
But tonight, the connection felt… cold, distant, almost a burden.
Inside, the music floated like a rare, complex perfume, designed to subtly manipulate neural states.
Crystal chimes, their tones shaped by focused light and collective neural thought, resonated in the bones.
Harp-tones woven from resonant light-fibers, creating harmonic frequencies that resonated deep within the bio-synapses of the guests, encouraging camaraderie.
It was a symphony of calculated perfection, designed to soothe and elevate, to distract and lull.
But beneath the harmonious waves, Arron detected a faint, discordant hum, a signature of flow-instability that no one else seemed to notice. A quiet disharmony in the grand design.
Tonight, Arron was the host. A public figure. An architect. A visionary.
But not for the reason anyone in that sprawling, celebratory room truly thought.
He was the center, but simultaneously, the furthest point. He felt the weight of their blind trust, a bitter tang in his mouth. A profound guilt.
Inside: the polite hum of laughter, the intricate dance of veiled politics, the brittle clink of fragile alliances being forged and broken.
They toasted to the Concord of Six Species, to another cycle of prosperity, to "progress"—a word so often empty of true meaning, a veil over deeper truths.
But Arron?
He toasted to a secret. A silence that hummed louder than all the celebration, a core of cold, determined intent beneath the pleasantries.
Each forced smile was a small, internal death, a step further from the man he once was. Regret, a deep, pervasive current, flowed through his energy-threaded veins.
A few names in the throng mattered, even if their true significance was lost on the general throng, even if their roles in the quiet unfolding were still unknown to them:
Vel Marrek, a Dravarn male.
His obsidian skin was not merely dark; it was layered with hardened bio-crystalline plating, the natural armor of a species evolved from volcanic environments, impervious to all but the most extreme thermal shifts.
His presence commanded space without effort. Once a revered general of the Concord's rapid-response forces, now a calculated, silent presence, a ghost moving through the living.
His eyes, deep-set and unblinking, seemed to hold the cold, unyielding gleam of ancient war relics, observing everything with a warrior's detached precision.
He moved with a quiet, deliberate grace that spoke of contained power, a predator at rest, assessing the room with a gaze that missed nothing, occasionally directing a subtle, assessing glance toward Arron.
There was a wisdom in those eyes, and a deep-seated weariness from battles unseen, a loyal vigilance that made Arron's hidden burden feel heavier.
Teyra Lom, a Felari female.
Her four iridescent eyes, arranged symmetrically on her delicate, multi-faceted face, shifted and observed with unsettling precision, constantly processing multiple data streams and light frequencies.
Her voice, normally a low hum that could, if amplified by focused flow-signatures, resonate through molecular bonds, was currently modulated to a soft, almost hypnotic purr, perfectly suited for diplomatic discourse and subtle persuasion.
She was a renowned scholar of exo-biological theory and a tactical mind that could dismantle complex systems with a few well-placed questions, her intelligence a cutting, elegant blade.
She often directed her lower pair of eyes to the ambient flow patterns, as if reading the unspoken intentions woven into the energy itself.
Arron felt a pang of guilt, knowing the quiet calculations she was making were built on incomplete truths. He saw subtle concern flicker in her eyes, a question she hadn't yet vocalized.
Minister Ked Arn, a Zytheran. His skin, normally a shifting pattern of translucent, cracked opal over visible bio-luminescent musculature, was currently muted, reflecting the ambient light of the palace, though a faint internal luminescence still pulsed, betraying nervous energy.
He was always coiled, like a spring held under immense tension, a nervous flicker in his multi-segmented optical clusters constantly scanning for threats or opportunities.
Skeptical. Unreadable. His species was known for their hyper-cognitive processing, allowing them to run multiple lines of thought and analyze data streams simultaneously, making him a formidable, if unsettling, presence, always anticipating the next move.
Arron could almost feel the tangential thought-streams spinning around Ked Arn, a constant, low thrum in the ambient flow, a quiet calculation.
And Lira Ven, a fellow Nirreni. Arron's aide. His compass in a world of shifting coordinates and veiled intentions.
Her gaze, direct and unflinching, seemed to read truths even when his lips shaped practiced lies.
Her silvery hair, almost luminescent under the triple suns, was swept back from a face that held both piercing intelligence and a deep, empathetic understanding that bordered on psychic.
She was a silent anchor, a presence that grounded him even as he drifted further from the known, the one person he allowed to see through the mask, if only partially.
He caught her eye across the hall, a brief, shared moment of unspoken grief for the weight he carried, a silent question in her crystalline pupils. Her presence was a quiet solace, a reminder of the personal cost of his ambition.
Then there was the Lumiflora Emissary, a being from the Aethelian Nebulae, its form a constantly shifting cascade of bioluminescent fluid contained within a shimmering, semi-permeable membrane. Its tendrils, like sentient ribbons of light, pulsed with an internal glow that varied in intensity and hue, a language of pure light-frequency.
It moved with a slow, deliberate undulation, absorbing ambient light and sound, its surface occasionally rippling with new patterns of internal brilliance as it processed information.
Its species communicated primarily through modulated light-pulses and subtle gravimetric shifts, which Arron, with his Nirreni attunement, could just barely perceive as a faint, rhythmic pressure against his sensory nodes.
The Lumiflora, however, seemed to emit a low, almost subliminal hum that only Arron, with his Nirreni attunement, could faintly perceive—a soft, repetitive cadence that felt like a quiet inquiry, or a distant resonance. Its light intensified slightly when its gaze settled on the flickering flow-crystal above the atrium, a silent, knowing observation.
None of them knew.
Not the full truth.
The Sky Palace hummed with the calculated joy of celebration.
Chandeliers of floating mineral orbs, each a carefully cultivated flow-crystal, flickered with encoded light, broadcasting silent music and informational streams to those tuned to receive them through their neural interfaces.
Waiters, their forms streamlined and efficient, moved like flowing water, carrying plates of flora-engineered delicacies that shimmered faintly in Kewaa's triple-light—bio-luminescent fruits designed for optimal nutrient absorption, crystallized nutrient gels that pulsed with subtle internal energies, and cultured protein strands that mimicked the textures of ancient, vanished ecosystems, all meticulously prepared to tantalize the senses of diverse species.
For a fleeting instant, one of the floating mineral orbs above the central atrium flickered erratically, its internal light stuttering before correcting itself. A minor flow-surge that went unnoticed by the jovial crowd.
Arron's crystalline pupils registered it, a phantom chill, a silent confirmation of the subtle disquiet he had been sensing.
Someone raised a glass.
The precise sound of light-crystal against light-crystal echoed across the vast main hall, a chime that resonated with the celebratory flow-net.
"To Arron Kael! Visionary of this age! The architect of our future!"
More cheers.
The musical clinks of crystal against crystal. Smiles painted like stained-glass windows across the faces of a hundred dignitaries from a dozen species, their forms ranging from the multi-limbed and heavy-set to the ethereal and light-bodied.
Arron felt the weight of their applause, a suffocating blanket of projected glory. It felt like praise for a ghost.
Arron nodded.
His lips curved into a practiced, elegant smile. A perfect mask. A flicker of internal strain, instantly suppressed. The burden of leadership, the isolation of knowing, settled heavier on his shoulders.
And then he turned away, his gaze returning to the sprawling city below, the rhythmic glow of its flow-conduits a constant, reassuring hum against the deeper blues of the twilight sky.
The third sun, Virellia, a pale, crooked disc, seemed to pulse faintly in the distance, a silent, judging witness to the deception, its faint light casting long, unstable shadows across the metallic sheen of the Sky Palace's outer shell.
Memory surfaced. Sharp. Clear. Untainted by the present's complex layers. A rare, pure moment of grief and longing. He grasped at it, a desperate anchor.
He was seven. A small Nirreni, all angular limbs and curious, wide eyes, absorbing the world with an insatiable hunger for data, for pattern, for connection.
His energy-threaded veins were just beginning to show their faint silver filigree, a delicate map of nascent power beneath his translucent skin.
"Where's Mom?" he had asked. His voice, then, was high-pitched, filled with an uncomplicated yearning, a simple query in a universe that seemed endlessly complex, yet then, so full of promise.
His father didn't lie. Not outright. He just pointed to a star above the horizon, its light a gentle blue, a pinpoint of pure, cold brilliance against the deeper blues of the twilight sky.
The Star of Tirza. Its light seemed to pull at something deep inside Arron's young core, a cosmic magnet.
"See that? That's Tirza. That's where she is. Working. Living. Watching you."
Tirza.
A massive, self-sustaining star-lab orbiting a twin-star system—a beacon of pure scientific pursuit, a sanctuary for minds too brilliant, too focused on the theoretical limits of trans-dimensional physics and spatial fabrication, to stay grounded on a planetary surface.
Minds like his mother's, who sought to unravel the universe's most fundamental constructs, pushing the boundaries of what was known, what was possible.
She sent fruit sometimes—bio-engineered for sweetness and cellular stability across light-years.
Crystals that pulsed with a faint, internal light, like slow-beating hearts, souvenirs of her experiments with resonant matter.
Jars of stardust—microscopic particles collected from nebulae, shimmering with residual cosmic energy.
Laughing voice notes, transmitted via quantum entanglement, her voice rich and warm despite the vast, impossible distances.
Sometimes, the faint, high-frequency hum of a distant exo-probe would flicker through the quantum link, an accidental auditory ghost from her research.
He always sent back updates. Sketches of his increasingly complex flow-energy schematics, detailing hypothetical nexus points and energetic conduits within architectural forms.
Reports on his early experiments with bio-mechanical interfaces and localized grav-fields.
Dreams—written down in careful, precise script, detailing the strange, impossible structures that visited him in his sleep, entities made of pure light and fractured space, whispering of pathways between realities.
He drew the shimmering lines he saw, the impossible geometries, filling sketchpads with visions no one else seemed to perceive.
One night, as the triple suns set, painting the sky in impossible hues of violet, gold, and the unsettling shimmer of Virellia, the Wraith Sun, Arron, just seven, decided:
Not just to visit.
To build. A bridge. A pathway. A way to cross the impossible void, not just for him, but for everyone.
A monument to connection, born of a child's lonely ambition, now a heavy burden.
The guests toasted my name.
"To Arron Kael! Visionary of this age! The architect of our future!"
Their voices echoed through the palace, unaware.
The dream was born in me that night, a quiet ambition in a boy's heart.
He looked out at the distant, shifting light of Virellia, then up at the unwavering cold fire of Tirza. The dream was still there, but now, it was scarred. And the stars, indifferent and vast, held his secret. A wound that wasn't yet healed.
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M.R.Synn