Echoes of the Storm
The *Last Bastion* drifted in the silence between stars, its hull scarred and engines sputtering. The air inside smelled of burnt wiring and grief. Syra sat cross-legged in the ship's meditation chamber, her neural tendrils plugged into the Bastion's core. Data streams flickered across her mind—Aeloria's last energy signatures, the Forge's stabilized frequencies, and the Maw's lingering whispers.
*She's not gone.* Syra's fingers trembled. *She's a pattern now. A echo in the quantum foam. We just need to—*
"Syra." Ignar's voice growled through the intercom. "Get to the bridge. Now."
---
The bridge viewport revealed a nightmare. A sector of space had *shattered*, reality peeling back like rotten skin to expose a throbbing wound of violet-black energy. Within it, distorted figures writhed—**Celestial Huskers**, their once-radiant bodies warped into spindly, multi-jointed horrors. Their eyes pulsed with familiar starlight. *Aeloria's light.*
"They're harvesting her residual energy," Syra whispered. "The Maw's using her as a bridge."
Lira pressed her dark matter hand against the viewport. The substance rippled hungrily. "Smells like… burnt cookies. *Her* cookies." Her grin faltered.
Ignar slammed a magma-fist into the navigation console. "We blow them to ash. Then we find whatever's left of Aeloria and drag her back."
Syra's tendrils flickered. "The Bastion's weapons are at 34% efficiency. A direct assault would—"
"Since when do we need efficiency?" Lira's arm morphed into a jagged hook. "Let's *play*."
---
The Bastion plunged into the fractured zone. Gravity inverted; the ship's artificial atmosphere hissed as half the crew vomited. Syra anchored herself telepathically to the ship's skeleton, her mind flooding with the Huskers' screeching chorus.
*STARLIGHT-BROKEN-CHAINSSSS…*
"They're aware," Syra gasped. "They know we're here to reclaim her."
The Huskers attacked. Three latched onto the Bastion's hull, drilling through reinforced adamantine with proboscis-like appendages. Ignar charged into the breach, magma surging from his pores. "You want fire? *Burn!*"
Lira leapt into the vacuum, her dark matter elongating into a whip that severed a Husker's limbs. "Catch!" She hurled the twitching remains at another creature. "Sharing is caring!"
Syra synced with the Bastion's weapon systems, firing precision plasma bursts. Each Husker dissolved into violet mist—but the mist coalesced into thicker, taller forms. **Husk Titans**, their bodies studded with Aeloria's starlight like infected wounds.
"Fall back!" Syra ordered.
"No," Ignar roared. "We rip out their cores!"
---
The Titans slammed into the Bastion, their fists cracking the ship's spine. Alarms wailed. Syra's nose bled as she fought to hold the neural link. "Lira! Their chest cavities—there's a resonance node!"
"On it!" Lira's arm morphed into a drill, spiraling through a Titan's chest. Inside, suspended in a cage of bone, throbbed a shard of crystalline light. Aeloria's essence.
The Titan shrieked, backhanding Lira into a floating debris field. "*Mine!*" it gurgled.
Ignar surged forward, magma engulfing the Titan's legs. "Syra—the shard!"
Syra's telekinesis gripped the shard, yanking it free. The Titan imploded, its energy sucked into the crystal.
Lira floated nearby, clutching her fractured ribs. Her dark matter arm quivered, absorbing traces of the violet mist. "Uh… guys? My arm's *tingling*."
---
Back aboard the Bastion, Syra analyzed the shard. "It's a fragment of her consciousness. If we collect enough, we could…"
"Rebuild her?" Ignar crossed his arms. "Or give the Maw a backdoor into our heads?"
Lira's arm had grown, its dark matter now streaked with Aeloria's starlight. She absentmindedly carved shapes into the floor—a perfect replica of the Primordial Forge. "It's talking. Not words. *Math.* Pretty, spiral-y math."
Syra's tendrils snapped toward Lira. "You're interfacing with the corruption. We need to purge it before—"
"No." Lira's eyes glinted with void-black hunger. "It's *teaching* me. How to bend. How to… *unfold.*"
The ship shuddered. On the viewport, the fracture zone collapsed—and something *larger* emerged.
---
A planet-sized maw yawned open, its teeth forged from dead stars. At its center floated a humanoid figure—skeletal, with Aeloria's face stretched over its skull like a mask.
**"THANK YOU,"** it intoned, voice a harmony of the Maw's guttural rasp and Aeloria's steel. **"YOU BROUGHT ME THE FIRST SHARD."**
Syra's blood froze. "It's not her. It's a *puppet*."
The Aeloria-puppet raised a hand. The Bastion's engines died.
Lira snarled, her corrupted arm swelling into a serpentine mass. "Give. Her. *Back!*"
Ignar charged the cannons. "Syra—get us out! Now!"
"The engines are offline! We're—"
The puppet's fingers twitched. Space itself *ripped*, dragging the Bastion toward the Maw's throat.
---
Lira's arm exploded outward, dark matter and starlight weaving into a fractal shield. The Maw's gravitational pull slowed. "Syra! The shard—*feed it to me!*"
"You'll lose control!" Syra shouted.
"*NOW!*"
Syra hurled the shard. Lira's arm engulfed it, and her body *unfolded*.
Her form became a kaleidoscope—a living equation of flesh and void, bending reality around the Bastion. The ship lurched away from the Maw's grip as Lira screamed, her voice oscillating between dimensions.
The Aeloria-puppet laughed. **"YOU WILL ALL BE MY VOICE."**
Then, with a thunderclap of distorted physics, the Bastion crashed into normal space—leaving the fracture zone sealed behind them.
---
Lira lay in a crumpled heap, her arm shriveled to ash. The shard was gone.
Ignar scooped her up. "Why the void did you do that?!"
"She… told me to," Lira mumbled. "Aeloria. In the math. She's trapped in the numbers."
Syra stared at the cosmic dust swirling outside. "The Maw's evolved. It's not just consuming now—it's *imitating*. And it's using her to do it."
Ignar's magma cooled to obsidian. "Then we hit it with everything. Shards, ships, *stars*. We don't stop until she's free."
Lira's fingers twitched. On the floor, her ashes had formed a single rune: **Θ**—the First Ones' symbol for *convergence*.
Somewhere, in the dark between truths, the storm stirred.
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