As the Aeon Ascent cleared the Dome, the Martian winds howled.
The ship twisted, locked coordinates from the Hollowed Kin star map, and pierced the upper atmosphere like a spear of starlight.
Inside, battered and bruised, the team stood around the projection table.
Mina looked back once at the red planet shrinking behind them.
"No turning back."
Thale nodded. "Next stop: wherever Julian's ghost wants us to go."
The ship shuddered. The stars stretched—
And with a flash of impossible color, they vanished from this system entirely.
Location: Uncharted System – Coordinates: [Redacted by the System]Timestamp: T+2 hours after the jump
The Aeon Ascent emerged from the quantum fold in utter silence.
There was no shockwave, no visual fanfare—only the subtle flicker of stars rearranging themselves, as though the fabric of space had blinked. And suddenly, they were no longer in any system charted by human or alien archives.
The viewscreen expanded.
Outside the ship, a supermassive gas giant loomed, the color of bruised gold and shifting violet clouds. It was encircled by thirteen moons, all jagged and irregular, none matching typical planetary formation patterns. One moon shimmered—not from light, but from motion. Structures. Towers.
"Life?" Mina whispered.
"No known EM output," Thale replied, fingers flying across the sensor console. "But... Julian's map led us here for a reason."
At the center of the system floated something impossible: a massive orbital lattice, shaped like an abstract polyhedron, nearly the size of Earth's moon. It wasn't natural. And it wasn't entirely stable, phasing in and out of visible space like a dream slipping between dimensions.
"It's a machine," Ossa muttered. "A watching one."
"Julian once said," Mina murmured, "'If you stare long enough into deep space, you'll find something that's been staring back far longer.'"
Atmospheric Entry – The Ghost Moon
The ship guided itself. Julian's posthumous system—the Sentinel Core—had interfaced with the ancient star map burned into the ship's command crystal. It plotted a course toward the fourth moon, a fractured gray sphere half-covered in translucent plating like fossilized glass.
"Orbital entry is smooth," Thale confirmed. "But there's no signal bounce. No return comms. It's like the surface is... swallowing light."
The Aeon Ascent descended, its hull glowing faintly as it passed through a plasma veil that shimmered with unnatural patterns. Beneath them, a sprawling alien complex came into view—abandoned, possibly ancient, but still alive with dormant power.
And then—
BANG.
A shock tremor rocked the ship. Lights flickered. External pressure surged.
"Brace! We just tripped something!"
But it wasn't a weapon.
It was an activation sequence.
Dozens of glyphs etched into the surface of the moon lit up in a cascading spiral, forming a massive eye-shaped symbol that encircled their landing zone. The complex beneath them began to hum, and for a second, reality itself felt stretched.
The ship stabilized. Then... nothing. Stillness. Silence.
"Systems normal," Ossa breathed. "Except for the radiation. It's... structured. Patterned."
"Like a language," Mina added. "Something is trying to speak."
First Contact – Unspoken
The team suited up. They exited the Aeon Ascent in full atmospheric armor—though oddly, the moon's air was breathable, almost tailored. The architecture was unlike anything human or even Hollowed Kin. It was fluid, as if carved by motion and thought.
The walls shifted as they walked.
The passageways reformed to guide them.
Then they reached a cathedral-like chamber, its ceiling open to the stars, though no light from the gas giant passed through. In the center stood a monolithic sphere of dark glass, floating silently.
"Julian's signal ends here," Thale said quietly.
Suddenly, the orb pulsed—once.
A beam of structured photons shot into the air, projecting an image: not Julian, but a figure of light, genderless, glowing with fractal geometry and a voice like distant thunder:
"You carry the mark of the Ascended Wound."
"One of you has passed through the Watcher's Eye."
"You are known."
"You are… trialed."
Before anyone could respond, the light shattered. A blinding cascade of energy surged outward—collapsing the wall behind them and exposing a hidden passage that dropped deep into the moon's core.
Descent Into the Unknown
The team stood at the precipice.
Below, winding spirals of glowing alien circuitry stretched like vines around an underground city built inside the moon's hollow shell. Lights flickered. Echoes rose—of machinery, voices, warnings.
And somewhere below... something ancient stirred.
Mina turned to Thale, gripping her rifle tighter.
"We follow the map."
"No," Ossa corrected, staring into the depths.
"We follow Julian's plan."
The Aeon Ascent's external lights blinked thrice—an automatic signal, pre-coded by Julian before launch.
Proceed.
And so they began the descent.
The stairwell into the moon's core was alive.
Not in the biological sense—there were no tendrils, no alien slime—but in something deeper. Each step resonated beneath their boots, sending subtle harmonic feedback into their suits. The metal was smooth and dark like hematite, but it pulsed softly, syncing with their footsteps as if the structure itself was listening.
"Sensors are useless past this point," Thale muttered, glancing down at his HUD. "The system's rewriting inputs as fast as I get them. It's like the tech below us bends interpretation."
"Reality is a suggestion here," Mina said. "Julian would've loved this."
Ossa scanned the walls. Etchings began to form along them, not engraved but emerging—like condensation shaping itself into glyphs. They were dynamic, squirming when observed, coalescing when ignored.
"Don't look too long," she warned. "The symbols... feel recursive."
"What does that even mean?" Thale asked.
"It means they're writing us back."
Room of Reflections
They descended for nearly half an hour, following the corkscrew path. The passage finally opened into a chamber that was impossibly large, far larger than the moon's interior should allow.
The architecture twisted upward into mirrored spires, their reflections stretching infinitely across curved walls of black glass. In the center, a column of liquid light floated mid-air, rotating slowly like a holographic DNA strand.
"We're inside something's memory," Mina said, staring at it in awe.
As she approached, the column flared. Suddenly, each of them was surrounded by a simulated memory sphere—fractals of alien cities, ships drifting through the void, a dying star being devoured by silver tendrils.
Ossa cried out and staggered back, yanking off her visor, gasping.
"They… fed on suns," she choked. "I saw one—being tethered."
Julian's system—still accessible through their linked implants—pulsed once, decoding a single glyph from the spinning column.
"The Architects of the Hollowed Kin."
"Designers of the Trials."
"Harvesters of Thought."
The Living Hall
As they left the reflection chamber, a passage formed ahead of them. They didn't choose a path—the structure rearranged itself, deciding.
"It's a test," Mina whispered. "Julian's system predicted this. The Watcher inside wants to see how far we'll go."
The hallway was tighter now, its surface coated in a crystalline mesh that shifted colors as they passed—blue for Mina, green for Thale, crimson for Ossa.
Each color reacted to their thoughts.
Thale reached out and touched the wall with his gloved hand. The structure opened a viewport, showing an image of Earth—but aged. Desolate. Lifeless.
"This is what happens if we fail," Ossa muttered. "Or maybe... if we succeed in the wrong way."
Suddenly, the floor beneath them dropped.
They plunged into a spiraling gravity well and landed softly in another chamber—the heart of the moon.
The Core and the Eyes
The room was spherical, with five gigantic eye-like structures embedded in the walls. They blinked—not mechanically, but organically. And when they opened fully, beams of coherent memory lanced across the chamber, targeting each of them.
A booming voice resonated—not in sound, but inside their thoughts.
"YOUR WOUND IS FRESH."
"YOU CARRY THE ASCENDED'S GENE."
"THE MAKER HAS RETURNED… THROUGH YOU."
Mina collapsed. Her body trembled.
She was bleeding light from her hands—bioluminescent energy leaking from her skin like liquid gold.
"System override," Thale said, panicked. "We have to pull back—she's—"
"No!" Mina snapped. "This is part of it. It's not harming me. It's unlocking something... deep."
From her open hands, glowing data flowed into the room, syncing with the eye structures.
Each eye projected a fragmented map, each segment representing a different system, ancient nodes, and worlds long dead.
One word echoed in their heads, over and over:
"CONVERGENCE."
The Rising Threat
Just as the final eye activated, a signal pulsed back through the system.
Not one of welcome—one of warning.
A shape appeared in the center of the room: a projected vessel—an obsidian obelisk-like ship, tearing its way through slip space, targeting the alien system.
Julian's system lit up with priority alerts.
"That ship is coming for this place," Thale said, stunned. "And it's not human."
"Not Hollowed Kin either," Ossa added.
Mina narrowed her eyes as her light finally dimmed.
"Something else is hunting the Watchers now."
Outside the walls of the moon, far above them in the stars, the obelisk-shaped vessel dropped into real space like a blade piercing water.
And it was already scanning for them.