The Silent Pulse

The Myrminian towers, usually lit with a faint golden shimmer, dimmed. Kael stood on the observation platform high above the valley of Skarn—now more a fortress than a city. Below, insectoid sentries with crystalline armor marched rhythmically, forming strange geometries as they patrolled. But tonight, there was a disruption in the pattern—a stillness that wasn’t part of the plan.
The Pulse had returned.
Every few weeks, a ripple of unknown origin swept across the land—interfering with communications, making Arkanian beetle-tech twitch and fail, and worst of all, triggering wild behavior among lower-order bug species. The insects called it The Silent Pulse, though no one yet understood it.
Kael had a theory. One that even the Myrminians had ignored.
He believed it was not just interference—but a message.

---
Far beneath the Skarn crust, where the roots of fungal networks intertwined with mechanical relay-nerves, an ancient chamber began to stir. It was one of the few remaining relics from before the bug reign—an old Human observatory, swallowed by time and hidden under layers of larval construction.
Inside, the pulse was recorded on a decayed screen. Something had spiked in the gravitational background. It wasn’t electromagnetic. It wasn’t seismic. It was dark. Not absence, but presence—a Dark Matter Event.
Unknown to even the Myrminians, an ancient human AI, long dormant, stirred from slumber. Its name: OBLIVION-9.
It had one purpose: wait for signs of cosmological destabilization. And now, something near the core of the planet—a collapsed dimension of decayed time particles—was reacting. OBLIVION-9 activated a protocol meant to trigger if humanity was endangered. But now, the world belonged to something else.
So the protocol adapted.

---
Kael stood before a council of Hive Minds: the Radiant Queen Skellith, the Chrono-Moth Oracle, and the hardened soldier-lord Antares Rex. The council chamber, veiled in scent-coded mists, felt heavy with old secrets.
Kael began, “The Pulse isn’t natural. It’s a gravitational echo. A resonance from beyond what we know. I think—no—I know something is moving beneath us. Something we can’t see. Something made of the same stuff as the void between stars.”
Antares clicked his mandibles. “Dark Matter?”
Skellith leaned forward. “Impossible. It doesn’t interact. It can’t speak.”
Kael’s eyes glinted. “But what if it’s been listening?”
The Chrono-Moth spoke next, its voice a fluttering whisper of time, “I have dreamed of a being...shaped like man, made of shadows, carrying fire that does not burn. I believe...this darkness is not empty. It has intent.”
Skellith hissed, “Then we are not alone in ruling this world.”

---
That night, in a storm of wind and spore, the Pulse surged again—stronger than before. Across the world, insect cities flickered, drones fell from the sky, and Kael’s human memories began returning more vividly than ever.
One name echoed inside his skull: Dahlia.
His sister?
His past?
Or something else... buried deep in the folds of space, twisted in dark matter’s grip?