The rebirth

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The nebula isn’t a cloud—it’s a *scream*.

The warship shudders as we pierce its outer layers, the hull groaning under the weight of a thousand fractured realities. The coordinates led us here, to this roiling expanse of liquid shadow and starlight, but the hologram didn’t prepare us for the *sound*. It’s not auditory; it’s neural, a frequency that claws at the base of the skull, peeling back sanity layer by layer. Ravel grips her armrests, her face bloodless. “Make it stop. *Make it stop.*”

Veyd’s hands fly across the control panel, his makeshift eye-lens flickering. **“The nebula’s alive. It’s broadcasting the Weaver’s… *memories*.”**

A vision erupts behind my eyelids:

—*A galaxy strung on a loom, threads of time and space pulled taut by skeletal hands.*

—*The Primal Verse’s earliest fleets, fleeing a shadow that devoured their homeworld.*

—*A child with fractal eyes, Lyra’s face, whispering a lullaby in a dead tongue.*