Ella's voice wavered between awe and disbelief. “She looks just like—like the old Earth mythologies. All those figures painted on some of the ruins we found.”
Dravok and Zapharos watched me. I could feel them probing at my mind, but I closed it off. They wouldn't get anything from me. One thing I knew with brutal certainty: the war that I'd always prepared for was here, and it had something to do with the mystery female in the cell.
Xandros stepped closer to the holovid, studying the female with less clinical detachment than before. “We don’t know what or who she is, only that she is some kind of soldier. She understands the ship's tech. She fought, hard.” His words made me ball my fists. They better not have hurt her. The thoughtsurprised me, but then again, it didn't. Some things are just destined to be.
One thing I knew with absolute certainty, though. “She’s not a soldier, she’s an executioner.”
Ashley arched a brow, interested. “Like you?”
“Worse,” I replied, and felt the full weight of the flaw inside me bloom open. We were fighting so hard to keep the Dark Abyss at bay and the Harrowed One contained within it, but I sensed that it wasn't just us staying the final battle. My gut told me that Naeris was part of it, whether she knew it or not. “She’s the reason the Darkness hasn’t won.”
Nobody spoke. Even Zapharos was silent, for once.
I turned to face Xandros, now with a purpose that almost felt holy. “I want to speak to her."
He hesitated, but I could see he would obey. That’s the thing about the edge—every empire, every faith, every memory—eventually, they all bow to it.
“Now,” I doubled down, a whisper, but it cut deeper than any order I’d given before.
I pressedmy forehead against the transparent barrier, feeling the energy field ripple beneath my skin. The material—stronger than glass, softer than diamond—shimmered with a subtle polarization when I exhaled, as if it breathed with me. Even the air inside my cell was strange: dense, slightly metallic, tinged with the sterile clarity of filtered oxygen and some other gas I couldn't place. The Sythari preferred a sulfurous, humid environment, but these new captors—whoever they were—had tailored the room specifically for me. Either they could read my genome, or they'd simply guessed from the shape of my lungs.
Beyond the barrier, the corridor curved away into shadow, interrupted at regular intervals by panels of hard white light. The architecture was a study in contradictions: corridors that bent in impossible directions, bulkheads layered in geometric patterns that distorted perspective, an aesthetic both ancientand hypermodern. I’d spent hours—maybe days—mapping the hallway’s rhythm, trying to divine a weakness, an escape, or just a logic to my imprisonment. I found only precision and a cold, unyielding beauty.
But even that was a distraction from the view that truly mattered. When the corridor was unguarded and the lights were low, I could peer through the transparent barrier across the void to the blue planet that hung in the distance. Earth, our mythical homeworld, the lost origin. I didn't know how I knew what this planet was, but I did. A deep ancient part of me recognized it. I traced the curve of continents with my finger and tried to imagine the weight of that gravity, the smell of petrichor after the rain. It was a relic, a wound, a promise.
Five years had passed since I took off the ceremonial robes, the shackles of ritual, and joined Kael'Varyn and his rebellion. In that time, I’d relearned a human history which differed from what I’d been raised with; it grew a strange longing in me for Earth.
Before we were captured by whoever held us aboard this ship, we’d taken High Priest Zevari and Grand Magistrate Nyxara hostage. Both Sythari, both in charge of the breeding protocols and discipline at the temple, and both so high up in the Order that their deaths would echo through the priesthood. I'll never forget the look of disbelief on High Priest Zevari’s face when he recognized me. "You are a Prime Luminae," he’d shouted. As if the title meant I needed to obey him.
I’d let the words settle for half a heartbeat, then stepped closer, forcing my voice to stay low, calm, and edged like a freshly honed blade. “I am a Prime Luminae,” I agreed with him. “You’re right about that. But you’re also a fool. Prime Luminae don’t serve. We don’t kneel. We don’t spread our legs for your sacred bloodline. And we sure as darkness falls don’t obey priests who treat us like prized breeding stock.” I smiled, thinand cold. “So the next time you open your mouth, High Priest, remember this: the only thing my title demands is that I end the people who think they own me.”
The memory of the moment, the look of terror in those orange, faceted eyes, was like a narcotic. For a moment, I’d believed in victory.
Then Kael'Varyn’s transmission had come through, raw and urgent. “Take them beyond Sythari reach. Don’t return. That’s an order, Naeris.” His voice, usually so measured, had cracked on my name.
I’d frozen, everything in me screamed to protest, to demand an explanation, but the channel was already dead. The soldier in me had obeyed, though. The coordinates he’d uploaded were uncharted, well beyond the reach of the Luminous Order’s sensor arrays. Even the navigation AI had flagged the destination asstatistically improbable,but I’d piloted the ship straight into the unknown, driven by a strange certainty that this was where we were supposed to go.
We made it only as far as the Oort boundary before the unfamiliar ships appeared, a swarm of them, each one unlike anything I’d seen in the Sythari fleet. Their dots appeared on the spectral grid—radar—seemingly out of nowhere. I remembered the moment their gravitational fields locked on our ship, the cold certainty of a tractor beam, the helplessness as my ship was pulled into a containment field.
We fought when they boarded, we fought hard, but there were only four of us against a never-ending stream of metallic enemies. A beam hit me, and everything after that was a blank. I woke here, alone, every weapon stripped away, every psychic ability nullified by the field around my cell. I had no idea what happened to my crew or my prisoners.
"Who the hell are you people?" I shouted the first time a figure appeared at the end of the corridor. The voice thatcame back was not Sythari, nor any derivative I recognized. Instead, it rolled out in a series of harmonic chords, clipped and unyielding, like metal scraping against glass. My captor—tall, with skin like living mercury that shifted in varying tones of violet—regarded me with cool detachment, as if cataloging a new species.
I paced the perimeter of my cell, testing every centimeter of the barrier for weakness. Sometimes I screamed, other times I pressed my face against the transparent wall and stared at the aliens, who appeared now and then, down, trying to read emotion in their impossible features. They never reacted, other than to speak in that strange, untranslatable tongue. I tried every dialect I remembered from the temple, every code and cipher passed down among the Ashen-Rael. Nothing worked. I was beginning to worry that I was being turned into a specimen, nothing more.
I dreamed of Earth every night. More than that, I felt something pull at me from that blue sphere. At first, it was just the ache of longing, but over the days it developed a gravity of its own, a constant tug in my gut.
I tried to reach out with my mind, searching for the familiar resonance of the Rebel network. There was nothing. No echo, no response, just a cold emptiness where there should have been the chorus of other minds. I wasn't sure if it was caused by the distance, or if we'd gone too far by taking High Priest Zevari and Grand Magistrate Nyxara, and the Sythari had retaliated by annihilating our rebellion.
Footsteps echoed down the corridor, more than one set. I pushed off the barrier and straightened, every one of my muscles tightening on instinct. One set was heavier, the cadence of someone built like a walking weapon. Another was lighter, almost familiar in a way that prickled the back of my neck.Then came two more female strides and three that sounded… different. Deeper. Like the floor itself was wary of them.
I moved to the center of the cell, shoulders squared, my braid swinging loose where strands had come free during my pacing. My black shirt clung to the curves I still resented, too soft for a rebel, too noticeable when I needed to be invisible. The holsters at my hips were empty, a constant insult. I flexed my fingers anyway, ready for whatever came next. Before the group rounded the corner, one set of footsteps already stood out to me. It made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up and sent shivers of anticipation down my spine.
When they came into view, the tall, purple-skinned alien I’d seen before led them, the metallic sheen to his skin only emphasized the cold detachment in his posture. Beside him walked the human female I’d glimpsed once before through the barrier. The one who came with the purple alien. Like then, she wore pants and a shirt resembling his uniform, filled with insignia I didn't recognize but felt certain called her out to be someone important. This time, my heart didn't leap at the sight of her. I'd reached out to her with my mind and found nothing. A blank, like the cell itself. She looked and held herself like a Prime Luminae, but now I knew she wasn't. She was human, that much was evident, but not like me. There was a difference between us; I just didn't know what it was or why. We didn't even speak the same language.
Last time she was here, she had carried a scanning device in her left hand. She tried to communicate, but it was as futile as the purple alien’s attempt. None of our tech picked up, and there was no mental connection. She indicated her desire to run the scanner up and down my arm, waited for my nod, then did so. She read the results, then handed the device to the alien. The two of them spoke briefly, their words a staccato volley of consonants and vowels that made my teeth hurt.
Then they left.
