Page 93 of Stars in Umbra
At the heart of Eden II’s Justice Center, beneath its stark façade of blackstone and burnished steel, the Riders and their closest allies were assembling in full force.
Filing inside, under Mo’s watchful eye, were some of the most powerful leaders in the quadrant: Kainan and Zane Sable. Selene Sable, in her role as Prime of Dunia, draped in her official signature jade robe.
Also striding in was the steely-eyed Rhesian King Auban, a quiet, calculating man famed for his insight, wisdom, and a soft voice that often cut deeper than any blade.
At the rear was the Galician Sky Commander, General Sargus, his silver-winged insignia glinting against his chest plate.
The blast doors sealed behind them, and the room went silent.
They assembled not to debate policy or planetary borders, but to examine mounting evidence of what some were calling a new power player in the galaxy.
Two months prior, a remote mining colony on Luxithra had gone dark.
When reconnaissance drones arrived, they found scorched earth, fused metal, and no living beings.
Neither signs of struggle, nor survivors, nor plasma burns, nor standard weapons signatures.
Then, a communications array on Korvan’s Rim went offline.
The station shutdown at the critical relay station followed an identical pattern: an instant blackout, every trace of life erased.
Worse, no demands and zero declarations.
Just a silent, surgical, and thorough devastation. Rumors spread through the outer rings like wildfire.
Rumors spread of ships gutted mid-transit, entire crews deranged by visions, and blinked out of existence.
Entire outposts were silenced, their sensor logs wiped clean.
Those that survived went insane, muttering in extinct languages about a celestial gate cracking open.
The phrase that returned most often, found etched in stone at the affected locations, whispered in static, or spoken through bleeding lips, was chilling: ‘When Sulfiqar wakes, the veil will burn.’
Earlier that morning, Mirage intercepted an anonymous message buried deep in the dark: a triple-encrypted data packet marked to the attention of the Sable Riders.
She pulled it up on the holo-display in private, her voice quieter than usual as she shared it with Mo.
‘I’m not sure why it is addressed to us,’ she explained. ‘Still, the language is ancient Sacranskript. The translation is uncertain, but I did my best.’
She displayed the statement in Sacranskript. ‘When the scythe-bearer unites with his kin to fight for Sulfiqar, the god on high, the lesser deities will fall and their flames will torch the cosmos.’
Mo stared at the words. ‘Sulfiqar?’
Mirage nodded once. ‘The idiom matches an old Sacran prophecy. The glyphic structure is identical to passages found in the Vault of Temeth, an ancient temple found in the deserts of Eden II. We need to find out what this means and send a report to Kainan and Zane.’
He clenched his jaw, then tapped into his Iccythrian intelligence web, a shadowy circuit of smugglers, slicers, black-market oracles, and mind-scrubbed seers loyal to his bloodline.
If anything real were stirring beneath the chatter, if a fallen god were rousing to sow a shit storm, his network would know.
However, every whisper returned amorphous results: no names, no faces, no intel, no coordinates, just whispers of old wives’ tales and mythos waking, coming back to life.
Mo didn’t dabble in superstition or folklore, but he had a measure of respect for the darkening shadows in places already stripped of most light.
He acted at once.
He raised the threat index, activated full-spectrum defense protocol across Eden II’s perimeter, and rerouted two squads of elite guards to the observation decks above the conference halls.
If the god of war was stirring, if this Sulfiqar’s return was more than a myth, then anyone who followed him might strike.
