Chapter 4: What Remains After Fire
The Seraph's Howl sliced back into the upper atmosphere, leaving the charred ruins of Vireth-9 in its wake. Its hull shimmered with cloaking protocols, making it vanish against the void-stained stars. Inside the ship's medbay, Ruby watched Lyra through the translucent shield of the stasis chamber, her fingers hovering just above the surface.
The med-chamber lights flickered in sync with Lyra's shallow pulse. Her vitals were low but stable—barely clinging to life. Whatever Nex Varrow had done, it had pushed her Titan genes into dangerous territory. Ether veins pulsed beneath her skin like cracks in crystal, and every breath she took carried the weight of worlds.
Ruby had fought horrors. Torn apart machines with her bare hands. Crossed into broken timelines where reality bled. But nothing had shaken her quite like seeing Lyra's face again—ghost-pale, quiet, and caught somewhere between sleep and ruin.
She turned as the ship's AI flickered into view. A small blue projection hovered above the med-console. It wore a humanoid form—a tall figure with no mouth, no eyes. Only a shifting void for a face.
"Her condition is deteriorating," the AI said. "Whatever experimental sequence was triggered in her genome is still active."
"Can you stop it?"
"I can slow it. But you already know what this means."
Ruby nodded slowly. "She's becoming something else."
The AI hesitated. "She's becoming something we may not understand."
She clenched her fists. "Then we adapt."
"You sound like your mother."
Ruby's eyes narrowed. "Don't talk about her."
There was silence.
Outside, the ship hummed through a rift gate—one of the deep ones, where space folded into itself like origami. Blue light flooded the cabin before vanishing as the Seraph emerged into a new quadrant. This one was colder. Older. Dotted with dead stars and wreckage from battles that hadn't been archived.
Ruby moved to the cockpit and pulled up the mission logs. She scrolled through bounty claims, half-buried threats, data fragments gathered from her last few jobs. Something was wrong. Nex Varrow's reappearance hadn't been random. He'd led her there. Left clues. Which meant something bigger was coming, something hidden behind the illusion of a simple bounty run.
Her eyes paused on a single data string—encoded in Titan glyphs. She decrypted it slowly, mouth tightening as she read.
"Project Echostorm."
The name pulsed on screen like a heartbeat.
Beneath it, only a single location code: Dross-12.
She leaned back in the captain's chair, staring into the void ahead. Dross-12 was a forgotten mining colony, barely a blip in any known registry. No trade. No population. No value. And yet, Nex had linked it to Echostorm—the same project her parents had tried to bury before the Eclipse Massacre.
"Set course for Dross-12," she said aloud.
The AI obeyed without question, rerouting the ship.
Ruby remained silent for a long while. Her thoughts drifted between fragments of memory. Her mother's voice. Her father's final transmission. The flames that had eaten her homeworld from the inside out.
And now Lyra, trapped in a body that wasn't hers anymore.
The ship jumped again, this time across a deeper fold. The strain of it made her vision flicker—an after-effect of her dormant power reacting to spacetime fractures. She rubbed her temples, trying to steady herself. Each jump was getting harder. The more she pushed, the more the Titan blood inside her resisted.
She'd hidden it for so long. Buried the truth under a thousand faces, a hundred aliases. But now it was boiling back to the surface. Being near Lyra had awakened something. A hunger. A warning.
You can't outrun what you are.
The ship dropped out of phase near a small planetoid. Dross-12 looked dead—no atmosphere, no visible surface structures. Just a crust of black stone and pale gray mist. But as Ruby scanned deeper, the truth emerged.
There was a structure beneath the rock. Deep. Ancient.
Not human.
She prepped for descent. This time she didn't wear full armor—just her phase-cloak and twin blades sheathed at her sides. She walked down the loading ramp into a dead wind. Her boots hit cracked stone. The air was dry, wrong somehow. Like a dream that had turned cold.
Sensors lit up immediately. There was movement underfoot. Rhythmic. Mechanical.
She followed the signal, weaving through jagged ridges and broken terrain until she found it—a narrow chasm leading down into the darkness. Ruby didn't hesitate. She jumped.
The descent was long, the fall broken only by heat vents and twisted rails—remnants of a long-abandoned transport system. She landed at the base in silence, her cloak absorbing the impact. The cavern ahead stretched wide, lit by faint violet energy crawling across the walls like veins.
Ruby stepped inside.
And stopped.
Rows of tanks.
Hundreds.
Each one filled with fluid. Each one holding something suspended in silence.
Bodies.
But not quite human.
Their limbs were too long. Their faces stretched. Their skin pale with hints of ether burn across their chests and spines. Hybrids. Failed ones.
She moved deeper, her heart pounding. This was more than a lab. It was a graveyard of experiments. Nex hadn't been working alone. Someone had funded this. Protected it. Hidden it beneath a world no one remembered.
A shadow moved near the far end of the chamber.
Ruby vanished, reappearing behind a pillar in less than a blink. Her eyes adjusted. A figure stood near the central console. Not armored. Not afraid.
Young. Tall. Hair like ink.
He turned, as if expecting her.
"You came," he said.
Ruby stepped into the light. "And you are?"
"They call me Sable."
The name echoed faintly in her memory. Her bounty logs. A rogue agent marked as a failed Titan heir. Rumors said he'd disappeared into the void after betraying the Red Eclipse. No one knew if he'd lived.
Until now.
"What is this place?" she asked.
"Home. To monsters. To miracles. Depends on who you ask."
"You're not supposed to exist."
"Neither are you."
Ruby stared at him. There was something wrong with his eyes—one silver, the other fractured like glass. He had Titan blood, but not like hers. Twisted. Spliced.
"Did Nex build this?" she asked.
Sable shook his head. "He was just the beginning."
Ruby narrowed her gaze. "You're lying."
"I'm surviving," he said. "Like you."
She reached for her blade. "If you're part of this, you're already dead."
But Sable didn't flinch. He stepped aside and gestured toward the console. "There's something you need to see."
Against her better judgment, she approached.
The screen lit up, playing a fragmented recording. A figure in the foreground. Familiar.
Her father.
He looked older than she remembered, face streaked with ash, voice worn with pain.
"They're trying to make gods," he said into the camera. "But not Titans. Not protectors. They want weapons. Carriers of death. We failed them, Ruby. We tried to stop it, but we were too late. If you're seeing this—run. Burn it all. Before it becomes worse than we ever imagined."
The recording cut out.
Ruby stood frozen.
Sable stepped beside her. "It's already become worse."
She didn't reply.
Because he was right.