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Free Excerpt:

Brightstar

Year 2220 NST – The Void, Aurora Galaxy

The crystal floated through the blackness of space. If you believe in fate, it could only be her cold hands that pushed it into proximity with the lone vessel to pass through that volume of interstellar void. If you believe in the Lightmaker, He was most assuredly responsible for the luminous, impossible enigma’s peculiar trajectory and timing. Only purpose and foreknowledge could have placed it where it would be noticed by that tiny, man-made vessel.

Whatever moved the crystal, however unbelievable its presence, the true enigma was its occupant, imprisoned in its impenetrable facets like an insect in amber.

Any memory he once possessed had long since fled. It was easy to let go of such things here. The entirety of his past became an incomprehensible blur. Even time itself, our inseparable companion in the odyssey of existence, had lost its grip upon him.

His awareness was a dream of a dream. Self was dissolute. He had drifted in the void for unmeasurable eons, becoming no more substantial than the surrounding emptiness. Time slipped around and through him, first frozen, then moving so fast reality blurred into a haze of past, present, and future, all running together like raindrops on the window of his being. Moments or ages, all was incomprehensible except the unrelenting drag of entropy’s talons upon the crystal prison.

That presence was the essence of decay, distilled to sentient awareness. The universe’s inevitable death fixed its gaze upon his soul through the crystalline facets around him. There was a profound horror in its glare. By rights, madness should take anyone with so intimate an awareness of the end that awaited all things. Even madness was beyond the scattered consciousness of the boy in the crystal floating through space.

His existence seemed a vector—a line connecting two realities—resolving itself at an almost imperceptible rate into something it had not been before.

Slowly, awareness tightened along time’s inexorable passage until it intersected.

The vessel approached, and his awareness coalesced further as its vector intersected with his and it drew him into itself.

Finally, as the darkness of the void gave way to light and infinity contracted and narrowed into a finite space around him, awareness faded and he dreamed.

Even his dream was a tortured throwback to the unfathomable timelessness he had just left behind. In the dream, he was again without self or reference, with only the very forces of nature for company. Staring at him through the facets of his reality was the hideous face of entropy itself.

His prison shattered and everything outside was inside. He screamed. It was inside of HIM. The horror invaded his being at every level, overwhelming him. He lashed out blindly, flailing in pain and panic, trying to repel the primordial force that assailed him.

Chapter 1

“Never ask for a savior unless you know what you wish to be saved from.”

- The Auguries Collected, Vol 2

Lashing out abruptly ended the nightmare of entropy and the eternal void. He had caused some sort of cataclysm he was too mentally muddled to comprehend. Darkness dissolved into a sensory assault of a different kind. Fine dust and grit itched on every square inch of his skin. His mouth tasted like charcoal. A distant, totally unfamiliar siren alternately whooped and wailed… and he wasn’t weightless any longer. He was falling.

A heartbeat later, his body impacted, one arm underneath, awkwardly twisted half-over. Sickening pain lanced through his arm and into his side, and he gasped, the air blasting into his lungs. His eyes flew open and for a moment he couldn’t see anything, then a faint red glow faded into existence above him, beyond the ragged edge of whatever made up the ceiling, only to disappear just as quickly. The air was cold. Every bit of him was cold.

The deluge almost pulled him into unconsciousness again, but he fought the tide, desperate to escape the dreams… had they been dreams?

Over and above the pain in his side, his head felt like it was splitting in half. He moaned and reached up to touch his face and forehead and his hand came away with a smear of something gritty and wet. He rolled onto his back, careful not to move his arm. Another dose of that pain might drag him down again. Above him, from the same direction as the pulsing red glow, he saw light bobbing about, first on a wall, then the ceiling… was that a hole in the ceiling and the room above? A voice floated down to him faintly from the same direction and a moment later the light shone down into the room from above, first aiming over his head to sweep the far wall, then slowly tracking down. It illuminated a great jagged hole he must have fallen through.

“Voids! What in space?!”

The light tracked down farther to fix on him, blinding him. He threw up an arm to protect his eyes and squinted against the glare. Thankfully, he had enough presence of mind to use his good arm. A moment later, the same voice came again, the twang of its accent as harsh as the stark light he shaded his eyes to escape. “You okay down there?”

He coughed, spitting out some of the dust that coated him and every surface around him, then tried his voice. It croaked, but he managed to answer, “Arm… Headache… Point that… Somewhere else!”

“Oh. Roight. Sorry.” The light left him to roam the room once more, and he let his hand drop to his temple, massaging gently, as if the physical act could aid in his fruitless effort to pull his scattered thoughts together. After another moment, the voice came back. “I’ll aff’ta go take a lift, or the stairs if it’s not back in yet. Likely going to fall through if I try to get yeh from ‘ere, mate.” The light disappeared and footsteps retreated rapidly.

He laid his head back again and drifted, allowing his focus to return gradually. In his stillness, the physicality of the grit against his skin, the pain pulsing in his arm and the still-whooping alarm threatened to overwhelm him.

An indeterminate time later—probably a few minutes, but he wasn’t exactly keeping track—a whooshing sound broke his reverie and the light was back in his eyes. He groaned and raised a hand, and the light quickly dropped again, accompanied by a nervous laugh.

“Ahh. Sorry, mate. Can yeh stand?” The figure before him …boy? …man? paused awkwardly, then shrugged. “Best not to try I guess. The Sixer’s on ‘is way. Called him, I did.”

A few seconds passed and the speaker cleared his throat nervously. “Name’s Keevan, Keevan Raddink. What shud we call yeh?”

“Nate.” The answer came without thought and he blinked. Nate. Yes, that was right. But… beyond that? Who was he? What had happened to him? The thought was baffling and strangely terrifying. He could remember nothing before his stretched eternity in the darkness inside the crystal, nothing except terror. Terror and… shame? He knew his past was a nightmare, and he wanted to forget it.

“Well, Nate, I think I’m gonna find yeh something to, erm… cover up with. Roight? Only got the one light, but powah should be back on in a seg.” Keevan turned and trotted off, happy to be doing something. A few more minutes passed with Nate resting his head, still slowly recovering himself. His arm still hurt but the pain was receding, as was his headache. He could almost think clearly by the time Keevan returned with a cheerful, “Alloo, found yeh a blanket!” The eager footsteps approached, and something soft dropped across Nate’s body. He shuddered. The touch was overwhelming. A million tiny caresses crawled across his skin, rubbing against the grit. He ground his teeth together and shook his head carefully, rubbing his hand over his face and hair yet again.

Keevan dropped down beside him and shone his light upward toward the hole above, illuminating his own face so Nate could see him. He was older than Nate by a few years, but couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. His face was covered in an onslaught of freckles and his nervousness was uncomfortable to watch.

After a moment, though, he visibly gathered his courage and smiled at Nate. “Look, I know it’s none’a my business. They’ll be here soon though, and I was… I was wondrin’. What was it like? They said yeh was floatin’ out there fer… well… practically since foreva. What did it feel like?”

Nate frowned at Keevan for a moment then opened his mouth to answer, but measured, purposeful footsteps approaching down the corridor interrupted him. A moment later, another person came around the doorway. In the dimness, Nate couldn’t make out much of this new figure, but he got the impression of a severe face with dark hair and dark clothing. Then the man stepped closer and his height became apparent. He towered over the room. Stepping inside, he walked directly beneath the pool of light Keevan was shining on the ceiling.

The dark man had an imposing air about him. His craggy, spare face might have been carved from marble, and his eyes took in everything, seemingly with a single glance. Something scaly glittered on his neck, reflecting the light back to Nate like a mirror. Whatever it was, only the edge was visible above the collar of his black, silky robes...