Chapter 1

The Iron Citadel hung in the inky blackness of space like a grotesque metal leviathan, its hulking form blotting out the feeble starlight. Regent Valeria stood rigidly on the observation deck, piercing eyes fixed on the immense space station through the curved transparisteel viewport.

This was the heart of the Archon Collective's regime, a symbol of their oppressive rule over the colonies that orbited the dead husk of a planet like celestial parasites. Valeria's hands clenched at her sides as she watched worker drones transfer supplies and fuel between the docked cargo haulers. Even from this distance, she could see the drab grey uniforms of the lower colony dredges scurrying about their tasks like ants.

"Such disappointing...inefficiencies," she murmured, mouth curling in disgust. These meager resources would barely maintain her tightening grip on power for another quarter cycle. The Primarch would need to be informed of her subjects' inadequacies yet again.

Valeria spun on her heel, silver locks whipping around her chiseled features. She strode from the viewport, posture ramrod straight, and reentered the central command Hub of the Citadel.

Down countless decks in the fortified underbelly of the station, a young woman with striking emerald eyes jolted upright on the bare slab that served as her cot. Lyra Everhart quickly clasped her hands over her mouth to muffle her ragged breaths. Fragments of feverish dream clung to the edges of her mind—winding up her powerful enchanting abilities until they detonated in an uncontrolled burst of arcane force.

Stilling her racing heart, Lyra forced herself to look around at the cold durasteel walls of the detention cell. The shimmering energy field separating her from the corridor beyond thrummed with contained power, its faint hum a ceaseless reminder of her captivity at the hands of the Archons.

How many days had it been? Weeks? The passage of time blurred in this underground prison where she was cut off from any cycle of light or darkness. Lyra shivered despite the stale air being carefully climate controlled. Were the other members of the resistance losing hope that she'd be rescued? That her powers as the last surviving enchanter would help turn the tide against the Archon's tyranny?

Her silent reverie shattered as a bone-chilling scream echoed from somewhere down the shadowed cellblock corridor. Pained grunts and the distinct thudding of baton strikes against flesh made Lyra's stomach knot with dread. She'd heard those same sickening sounds before—interrogation "techniques" used by the Citadel's merciless interrogators to break the spirits of those who dared defy the Archon regime.

A blur of armored figures appeared from a side passage, escorting a smaller figure doubled over and shrouded by a tattered robe. The beaten prisoner paused just long enough for Lyra to glimpse the bloody face beneath the robe's mangled cowl. Too late, the man saw her staring through her cell's containment field, eyes widening in desperate mute plea before the guards' batons battered him once more.

Lyra shrank back, clamping her eyes shut against the brutality as her cellmate's screams were cruelly silenced. When she dared open them again, the guards had dragged their captive out of sight.

Drawing her knees up, the enchanter berated herself for still being so naive—for ever believing the Archons were capable of anything less than utter depravity in service of their domination. But she quickly banished those doubting thoughts. She had to stay strong, for her sake and Aric's...

Halfway across the system, on a rain-lashed outer colony ring of rusting metal bulkheads and decaying transit tubes, Aric Everhart crouched over a worktable littered with circuit boards and esoteric electronic detritus. His sandy hair hung in lank, damp strands over his creased brow as he deftly coaxed a hairline fracture across a relay node's crystal matrix.

"C'mon, you miserable piece of junk," he growled through gritted teeth as acrid smoke curled up from the smoldering circuitry before him. The communications uplink needed to pierce the Collective's security net was proving far more ornery than he had anticipated.

But Aric refused to let such minor technical difficulties dissuade him. Not when his sister Lyra's life and the future of the entire resistance depended on this encrypted signal getting through. His jaw clenched with fresh resolve, Aric donned a pair of electrostatic gauntlets and made another pass with a focussed laser probe, coaxing the fried components back into cooperation.

A ghostly series of alien cyphers began flashing across the cracked monitor screen—finally, the uplink had established! Aric whooped triumphantly, fingers flying over the haptic controls as he furiously coded the data packet to beam out an automated distress call to the rebel outpost on the fifth lagrange point.

Just as the heavily encrypted burst transmission launched into the ether, his movements were bathed in pulsing crimson light. An ear-piercing siren klaxon made Aric nearly jump out of his skin and the hair on his arms stand on end. He whirled around in time to see the drone sentinel hovering just outside his dwelling's osmium transparisteel canopy, lights blazing and stun emitters arming.

"Oh gnash, not good..." he managed to choke out before the drone released an incapacitating neurotoxin cloud through the plas-shielding. Coughing violently and already dizzily disoriented, Aric fought to remain conscious while blindly groping for the makeshift transponder unit. If he could just destroy the evidence before the Archon's goons showed up...

His searching fingers froze as darkness encroached on the edges of his vision. Heavy armored footfalls reverberated outside, punctuated by staccato pulse blasts from stun rifles hammering on his makeshift barricade. Aric whirled toward the sound, swaying as the neurotoxins sapped his strength. Through bleary, unfocused eyes, he saw the doors burst open in an explosion of vaporized plasteel before the darkness finally overwhelmed him.

On the other side of the system, concealed within the deepest shadows of the Iron Citadel's arcane archives, a gnarled figure stirred as if disturbed from an ancient slumber. Eldred, the dark enchanter, inhaled deeply through flaring nostrils as his attuned senses tingled with the unmistakable ripples of potent magic being summoned.

"What's this?" The words were little more than a papery rasp hissed between cracked, withered lips. A skeletal hand, blackened talons protruding from frayed robes, gestured sharply toward a brazier of smoldering embers. Instantly, they flared with viridian flame, banishing the library's cloying gloom.

There it was again—that electric frisson of energy that made the hairs on his forearms rise in instinctive recognition. The last enchantress...she had at last begun to wield her powers. A lipless grin split Eldred's cadaverous features as he glided silently from the shadowed archives.

His bony fingers flexed as he murmured an incantation, summoning a scrying chalice from the aetheric aether. Black ichor of congealed magic swirled sluggishly within its crystal basin before resolving into increasingly vivid imagery—that of the unassuming outer colony dwelling where the disturbance originated.

The dark enchanter watched with rapt fascination as, one by one, armored figures in the livery of the Archon Collective broke down the flickering barricade and seized a young male human writhing in pain. Eldred tilted his wizened head in contemplation. Not the enchantress herself, but perhaps a clue to her whereabouts at last...

"Soon, child," he rasped with chilling finality, "Soon, the culmination of my centuries-long ambition will at last be realized. The bloodline of the last enchanting order will feed the ascendance of true power in this pitiful galaxy...and you will help me achieve it."

With those hushed words, the chalice's imagery dissolved into ethereal smoke, banishing the vision. Eldred ghosted back into the shadows of the Citadel archives, already plotting his next moves in the game of dominance for which he had so patiently waited these past millennia.

On the far side of the colony ring, the battered freighter Starfire cut through the turbulent troposphere, descending in a screaming vertical plummet before leveling off mere meters above the churning ocean. Inside the cramped cockpit, the dashing young rebel leader Kalen wrestled with the controls, expertly navigating them through a gauntlet of lightning storms and radioactive fallout pillars.

"We've got a situation, Kalen." The gruff voice belonged to Selene Astra, his second-in-command and most trusted lieutenant. She stalked onto the bridge, mouth set in a grim line beneath her cropped dark hair. Rain pelted off her worn leather trenchcoat as she slapped a datapad down in front of him.

Eyes never leaving the hazardous airspace displayed on the canopy's heads-up, Kalen snatched up the pad with one hand while simultaneously banking hard to starboard. The Starfire's repulsor engines howled in protest. He hazarded the briefest glance at the report scrolling across the device...and felt his breath catch in his throat.

A pair of crimson markers blinked ominously in the coordinates for the Fairlane outer colony ring: hostile engagement confirmed with an Archon Collective strike team and—Kalen read that final part again with dawning dread—a priority one asset designated for rendition. In the rebellion's coded language, that could only mean one thing: they had nabbed the source of his recent coded communiques... Aric Everhart.

Kalen's grip tightened on the datapad, knuckles whitening. He knew full well that Aric's code phrases hinted at a far more tantalizing prize—the potential clue to finding his sister, the fabled last enchantress the rebels had been seeking. If the Archons caught wind of Lyra's true identity and powers, she would be the highest value target imaginable. The key to turning the tide once and for all against the Collective's tyranny over the colonies. Or...the means by which the Primarch and his lieutenants could crush all hope for an uprising before it began.

"Then this is our chance," growled Kalen, finally meeting Selene's piercing gaze. "We have to get to that interrogation outpost before those Archon tabulons break him. We get Everhart off that ring, and we find out what he knows."

He threw the Starfire into a screaming descent, ignoring Selene's shouted warnings about the atmospheric hazards as superheated engine trails streaked through the rust-colored storm clouds. Jaw set, Kalen triggered the scramjets for a boost of emergency speed. Fairlane colony loomed ahead, resolving from the hazy miasma into a stark vision of rusting metal and deteriorating structures.

Either they pull off this daring rescue operation while the Archons had their guard dropped...or recent events would force the rebellion to accelerate their timetable for the next phase of their uprising far ahead of what any of them had planned. There would be no turning back now.

Kalen's grip tightened on the controls as the freighter pierced the cloud layer, engines roaring with seared atmosphere. The die had been cast at last. Their war against the oppressive Archon Collective was about to begin in earnest.

The Starfire shuddered violently as it knifed through the outer atmosphere over Fairlane Colony. Kalen fought the controls with grim determination, his face set in a mask of concentration as the battered freighter breached the first layer of storm clouds. Selene braced herself, steadying her stance against the rattling deck plating.

"Archon blockade dead ahead," she warned, jabbing a finger at the tactical displays. "They've locked down the whole sector."

Through the main canopy viewport, crimson warning strobes pierced the broiling dust clouds as a massive slab-sided cruiser loomed into view. It was flanked by a trio of smaller gunships, all blazing with running lights and bristling with enough heavy ordnance to shred the Starfire into atoms.

Kalen's jaw clenched as he rerouted auxiliary power to the forward deflectors. "I see 'em. Strap in and brace for evasive maneuvers."

Ignoring Selene's muttered curses, the rebel leader threw the freighter into a spiraling, high-g acceleration that sent unsecured equipment clattering across the bridge deck plates. The whine of sublight engines shrilled to an ear-splitting pitch as they reamed towards the blockade at ramming speed.

Green turbolaser fire lanced out from the Archon cruiser, blazing past the Starfire's swept-forward fuselage in a near miss that made the entire ship shudder. More focused barrages raked their position, but Kalen managed to jink them clear time and again with a dizzying series of high-speed zig-zag evasions.

"Almost in range," he gritted out through clenched teeth. "Prepping mag-pulse torpedoes for maximum yield!"

With the blockade cruiser's immense armored bulk rapidly filling the canopy, Kalen made one final, radical course adjustment to align the tubular launchers recessed in the Starfire's central fuselage. His finger hovered over the firing stud...

"Kalen, wait!" Selene shouted in dismay as a new indicator surged crimson on her display. "They've got a civilian medevac on direct approach vector! Break off, you'll—"

Too late. Kalen had already sent the high-yield mag-pulse warheads streaking out ahead of them in a blinding azure flare. The rebel let out a frustrated roar as the torpedoes detonated squarely amidships of the blockade cruiser with the force of small tactical nukes. For a split-second the warship seemed to almost hang suspended in the fireball's fury...then its armored hull bulged grotesquely before rupturing in a titanic blast wave.

On the viewscreen, the shockwave picked up a smaller craft closing rapidly from the outer colony ring's direction and simply erased it from existence in a searing lance of liberated energy. As the debris field cleared, there was no trace of the medevac shuttle—only a quickly expanding cloud of vaporized wreckage.

"No..." Kalen's voice was barely above a whisper, hands gone limp on the controls as the weight of what he'd just done slammed home. He'd just obliterated a civilian medical transport without hesitation in his zealous hunger to break the Archon blockade at any cost.

This was a line he'd vowed never to cross. Innocent lives lost for the sake of the cause, just like the atrocities he was fighting against. How was he any better than the enemy at this point?

"Sweet mercies," Selene was staring slack-jawed at the smoldering debris field drifting past them, her face drained of blood. "They were evacuating wounded from that ion storm last quarter..."

As the shock began to wear off, rage quickly took its place. She whirled on Kalen with fists clenched, seeming to swell with fury.

"You pulled that trigger without a second's hesitation! Don't you dare turn away from what you've just done, rebel-scum! Your insane need for vengeance against the Archons just got those people killed!"

Kalen opened his mouth as if to respond, but no sound emerged past the howling in his ears. What could he possibly say? She was right, after all...

The bridge intercom shattered the stunned silence, an urgent voice filtering in from the engine room.

"Containment failure in the port magnetic shielding! We're venting drive plasma, we've got to—"

Whatever warning was about to follow dissolved into static as the Starfire's sublight engines ruptured in a catastrophic overload. Explosive decompression ripped the freighter's midsection apart in a blinding azure fireball as vented plasma ignited. For a sickening instant, Kalen felt himself tumbling helplessly amidst a soundless storm of fire and metallic debris...

Then the infinite blackness of the void swallowed him whole.

An eternity seemed to pass as Kalen drifted weightlessly amid the scorched wreckage of the Starfire. His body tumbled lazily end over end, the colony's hazy atmosphere and the infinite starfield beyond blurring together into a dizzying kaleidoscope.

Fire blossomed across his field of vision as the freighter's shattered aft section disintegrated in a series of thunderous detonations. He tried to cry out but his voice was stolen by the vacuum, no air to vibrate his vocal cords. Only the ragged wheeze of his suit's oxygen recyclers penetrated the ringing silence.

Desperate, Kalen triggered the emerald flare on his wrist, hoping against hope that it would be seen by Selene or any of their scattered crew who might have miraculously survived the calamitous decompression event. Almost immediately, a return flare pinged his heads-up display from the spinning debris field dead ahead. He angled what little maneuvering thruster propellant remained to adjust his trajectory.

An agonizing few minutes later, the rebellion's leader collided in a bone-jarring impact with a slab of ceramisteel plating badly warped by the venting plasma fires. Gripping handholds burned into his gloves as he fought to gain purchase on the tumbling surface. Finally, he managed to haul himself fully onto the makeshift raft, maglocks in his boots and gauntlets allowing him to anchor himself securely.

Through his polarized faceplate, Kalen at last spied the source of the return flare—Selene herself, clinging grimly to a twisted section of the Starfire's main spar nearly two hundred meters away. Relief washed over him to see his most trusted lieutenant and friend still drawing breath in this nightmare scenario. But that fleeting emotional reprieve evaporated as a new threat vector materialized on his threat assessment display.

Burning through the choking debris cloud on an intercept course came a force of armed Archon pursuit drones and hunter-killer fighters. Kalen froze, not daring to move and reflect any more than the faintest whisper of heat signature. But it was too late—the Collective's forces had already registered their biosigns and locked on with a vengeance.

Crackling disruptor bolts slashed through the void, needling past within a hairsbreadth of Selene's position with microsecond precision. The barrage was merciless, probing and bracketing to triangulate their coordinates with each passing heartbeat.

Flattening himself against the plating, Kalen stretched one hand toward the small arms locker built into his EVA pack. Maybe if he could draw the Archon's fire and give Selene a chance to escape... His fingertips brushed the release housing just as a disruptor bolt slammed squarely into his upper chest.

Bone-rattling agony lanced through every nerve ending as the transparent aluminum faceplate fractured into a spiderweb of microfractures from the shockwave. His armored bodysuit sacrificed a good portion of its polymer plating and subdermal temperature regulators in an attempt to disperse the energy discharge.

But even as Kalen's vision started to gray around the edges, threatening to slip into unconsciousness, he knew he'd been incredibly lucky. That near-miss shot should have vaporized him outright. The Archons were going to make this a nice, slow, agonizing kill in reprisal for the blockade cruiser instead.

Distantly, he was aware of Selene's form rocketing past on her emergency thruster pack, strafed by a blistering stream of coherent firepower. Stay strong, he inwardly pleaded as the darkness reached up to claim him at last. For the sake of the resistance...and Lyra's cause...

Then the void went black and Kalen knew no more.

When his eyes fluttered open again, it was to see the unmistakable form of an Archon Collective prison barge looming before him, its armored belly yawning open to reveal the ominous darkness within. He barely had time to process this before the tractor beams began inexorably dragging what remained of the Starfire's wreckage into the gaping hangar…