Chapter 1 The Chase before Awakening

The stars stretched into knives.Kaelthar Veyros slammed his palm against the throttle, and the Vigilant Ash screamed as its engines burned far past safety margins. Space warped ahead of him—light bent, coordinates blurred—and behind him, the dark bloomed with hostile signatures.They had found him.Again.The cockpit trembled as a lance of ionized light tore past the starboard wing, close enough that warning glyphs flared crimson across the console. Kaelthar didn’t flinch. He had learned long ago that flinching wasted time—and time, tonight, was the only currency that mattered.“Lock broken,” the ship’s AI rasped. “Evasive vectors exhausted. Probability of escape: twelve point three percent.”“Twelve is enough,” Kaelthar muttered.His fingers danced across the control surface, not with the clean precision of a trained pilot, but with the instinct of a man who had survived too many chases to count. He was a detective by profession, not a soldier—but the universe had a way of teaching its own lessons, violently and without mercy.Behind him, three ships cut through the void like predators. Their hulls bore no flags, no recognized sigils of any lawful power. But Kaelthar knew them all the same.The Gradient Church.They never announced themselves. They never negotiated. They simply erased.Another blast struck closer this time. The Vigilant Ash lurched, artificial gravity stuttering. Kaelthar gritted his teeth as his stomach tried to climb into his throat.All this, he thought bitterly, over a corpse.The memory surfaced unbidden, sharp as broken glass.It had started as a routine investigation.A body found in the lower strata of Axiom Prime’s orbital ring—no identification, no external trauma, no obvious cause of death. The authorities had written it off as neural overload, another casualty of the endless pressure that modern life exerted on fragile minds.Kaelthar hadn’t agreed.The man’s expression had been wrong.Fear, yes—but not the fear of death. It had been something deeper. Recognition. As if, in his final moment, the man had understood something he was never meant to see.And then there were the marks.Not symbols, exactly. More like absences—regions where reality itself seemed reluctant to remember what had been there. Kaelthar had seen cult activity before, fringe belief systems that thrived in the cracks of civilization. But this was different. These marks weren’t graffiti. They weren’t carved or burned.They were missing.As if the universe had flinched away from them.Tracing those absences had led him down a spiral of half-deleted records, sealed archives, and witnesses who recanted their own memories mid-sentence. Every path, no matter how indirect, bent toward the same impossible conclusion.A name spoken only in whispers.A gradient—of belief, of power, of erasure.By the time Kaelthar realized he was being watched, it was already too late.A missile lock screamed in his ears, tearing him back to the present.“Warning,” the AI intoned. “Catastrophic damage imminent.”Kaelthar exhaled slowly. Fear was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He reached for the navigation core, fingers hovering over the emergency jump interface.There was one coordinate left.A dead coordinate.An ancient anomaly, buried under layers of redacted data and superstition. Officially, it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it was marked with a single note in a forgotten databank:DO NOT NAVIGATE.Kaelthar smiled grimly.“Story of my life.”He slammed his hand down.Space folded.The stars screamed.For a fraction of a second—less than a heartbeat—Kaelthar felt something look back at him through the jump. Not a being. Not a mind.A vast, indifferent awareness.Then the universe tore itself inside out.The Vigilant Ash crashed.Ice and steel met in a thunderous collision that shattered silence older than civilizations. The ship plowed across a frozen expanse, hull screaming as it carved a molten scar through endless white. Alarms howled, then died, one by one, until only the wind remained.Kaelthar lay slumped in his harness, blood trickling from his brow, vision swimming. He forced his eyes open.The canopy above him was fractured, revealing a sky unlike any he had ever seen—dark, heavy, and unnaturally still. No satellites. No traffic lanes. No signs of habitation.“AI?” he croaked.Static answered him.Kaelthar unbuckled himself and staggered out of the ruined cockpit, boots crunching against ancient ice. The cold bit through his suit instantly, sharp and unforgiving, but something about it felt… wrong.Too clean.Too untouched.He turned slowly, scanning the horizon. Endless ice stretched in all directions, broken only by jagged structures half-buried beneath glaciers—angular shapes that were neither natural nor entirely artificial.Recognition sent a chill deeper than the cold.“Antarctica,” he whispered.Impossible.Earth had been erased.Not destroyed—erased. Scrubbed from every official record, every navigational chart, every shared memory older than a few scattered myths. Humanity’s birthplace reduced to a historical void.And yet… here it was.Calling to him.Kaelthar’s gaze fell upon a structure emerging from the ice nearby—a spire of dark metal, etched with patterns that hurt to focus on. It pulsed faintly, as though responding to his presence.Against every instinct screaming at him to turn back, Kaelthar stepped closer.At the base of the spire lay something partially exposed by the crash.A book.No frost clung to it. No snow dared touch its surface.He knelt, hands trembling—not from cold, but from something far worse.Dread.The cover was plain, unmarked, yet the moment his fingers brushed against it, words etched themselves into existence, as if surfacing from a forgotten dream.The Record of Unforgettable ThingsKaelthar swallowed.“This… doesn’t make sense.”A sound echoed behind him—not footsteps, not wind.A presence.And then, before he could pull away, his other hand brushed the spire.The world shattered.Pain unlike anything he had ever known tore through his skull—not physical, but conceptual, as if his thoughts were being peeled apart and rewritten. Time stuttered. His heartbeat echoed in fragments. Memories stretched and twisted, overlapping with moments that had never happened.He screamed.Something ancient awakened within him, two vast currents colliding in his soul.One cold, precise, and infinitely patient.The other fluid, volatile, and terrifyingly intimate.Chronoveil.Psychomorph.The names burned themselves into his being without permission.Far above, unseen and unheard, mechanisms older than humanity stirred to life.The Earth shuddered.Ice cracked across continents.And a voice—calm, distant, and unbearably familiar—whispered into Kaelthar’s collapsing consciousness.“Begin.”Darkness swallowed him whole.