Prelude
4129 C.E.
UNKNOWN SYSTEM, ABANDONED SPACE
Though it rivaled the size of a Consolidate dreadnought and was the permanent home of nearly 900 devoted followers, the mothership Ouroboros was often a still and silent vessel. Esoteric technologies of the Melloi, infused into its circular hull in centuries past, blessed it with power and efficiency unheard of to the more primitive shipwrights of the galaxy. A near-total absence of emissions, frequencies and exterior lights allowed the craft to leave no trace of itself as it drifted through space. A very beneficial quality to its inhabitants, and to their leader most of all.
The serenity of the stars, however, was best experienced though the ship’s inner sanctum. Located at the uppermost point of its central command tower, this sacred chamber offered an unobstructed view of whatever lay directly in front of the ship. It was pitch-black, devoid of any elements that could distract from the massive circular viewport it contained. Here, one could bathe freely in the energies of the cosmos, seeking gifts of knowledge from an inscrutable intelligence.
“Almighty Sentient, heart and mind of the loathsome Void, source of the Glimmer absolute, hear me now...” In the darkness of the sanctum, Nyllyn muttered the start of a prayer in a deep, synthesized voice. The Ouroboros was turned towards a large black hole, encircled by a smoky accretion disk of grayish-purple nebulae. She basked in the glow of its corona, the ring of light reflecting off of the smooth, dark silver metal comprising her cybernetic helmet.
"For centuries, I have sought to understand your divine will. I have imbued myself with your dark energies, and decoded the secrets contained in the emissions of your eyes, but I still remain ignorant...” Nyllyn bellowed, her voice emanating through the sanctum. The black hole offered its usual response, broadcasting a constant deep groan to the receptor antennae of her helmet. An eternal symphony of dark energy and Hawking radiation.
“Oh Sentient, why will you not show me your guidance? Have I not done enough to deserve it?” Nyllyn cried, clasping her warped, needle-like fingers together under her black cloak. “Make no mistake, I am aware of my conceit. I have become a pariah to my former master, my former allies, and I continue to be an abomination in the eyes of the unknowing, but it was all for the sake of serving you!”
The Void continued to hum, its opinion unswayed. “I am wholly devoted to serving you, more so than even your self-proclaimed ‘messiah.’ I wish only to mend this broken and hateful reality you are tethered to...” Nyllyn said, slowly rocking back and forth. “Why, oh Sentient, will you not aid me in my plight?”
As Nyllyn prayed, she was entirely attuned to the ebbing of the hollow star that lay before her. This made her oblivious to the sound of a circular hatch spinning open on the opposite end of the sanctum, allowing a small and furtive figure to step through.
“Mistress...?” A voice to her right made Nyllyn gasp lightly, shaking her out of her meditative trance. She looked down and saw her steward, Celon, standing at her side. His obsidian robes concealed everything beneath his bald head, the gray-colored skin of which was wrinkled and coarse. His pitch-black eyeballs peered up at her with their twinkling white pupils. “Forgive my intrusion, mistress. I did not mean to disturb your congregation with the Sentient...” he said, bowing.
“You are forgiven, Celon. The Sentient remains silent, despite my prayers,” Nyllyn said, rising to her feet. Even at an above-average human height, Celon was only a third of her size, and had to crane his neck just to look directly at her head.
“I see...” Celon said, nodding gently as he glimpsed at the black hole for a moment. “I have the reports ready from the last set of injection tests we performed. Would you like to review them now?” He asked, offering a small holographic datapad up to her. Its blank screen was surrounded by a frame of smooth, silver metal, rounded into a perfect rectangle.
“Yes, thank you...” A pair of long, slithering metallic tentacles protruded out from under Nyllyn’s cloak, reaching towards the pad. One wrapped itself around the device and gently removed it from Celon’s quivering hands, while the other began to prod the screen with its perfectly-tapered tip. “I take it the experiments are still progressing well?” she asked, pulling it up to her featureless face.
“As well as we can manage, mistress. Thanks to Orvizo’s work in Alabaster and Consolidate space, we haven’t run short of subjects or materials, but the success rate of the injections still remains... low,” Celon said, his heading nodding from side to side.
“Less than five percent of them are surviving, according to this,” Nyllyn commented, tapping at the screen with her tentacle. A thin hologram made of pale white light levitated off of the datapad’s surface, the light bending wherever Nyllyn’s cybernetic feeler made contact. “Even the subjects that do survive don’t persist for long. Have you found the root of the problem, yet?”
“It’s the same issue we’ve been having ever since the experiments were started. The concentrated dark energy, when it is injected into the body of the subject, creates such intense psychological strain that it renders them brain dead within minutes,” Celon explained. “It’s consistent across every species we’ve tested, too. Humans, Nuvak, Alabasters, Jaadr, both male and female. They all perish immediately after the procedure.”
“I suppose... that’s to be expected,” Nyllyn said, turning back towards the black hole. She approached it slowly, her footsteps echoing through the sanctum. Her cloak hid all of her reviled, distorted flesh, making her seem to glide like a looming ghost across the floor.
“We are at the mercy of a fickle and loathsome god. The Void is entirely indiscriminate, in both its guidance, and its hatred.” She stared longingly into the black hole, but it refused to stare back, still singing its gravitational hymn.
“If I may suggest something, mistress, perhaps the injection process is due for a revision,” Celon posited.
“A revision...?” Nyllyn’s head tilted away from the viewport sharply, causing her wire-ridden cyborg neck to release a muffled, metallic crunch.
“Only if you’d allow it, mistress. Using the Cabal’s stabilizer needles, we could probably keep the subjects alive for longer after the-”
"Oh, so you believe the Cabal knows better than us?” Nyllyn asked, turning towards Celon. Her cybernetic tentacles dropped the datapad and began to slither towards his body, forcing a cry of fear out of him that he tried to stifle. “Are you suggesting the methods of the Hierophant are superior to my own?”
“N-No! Of course not, mistress! I would never imply such a thing. Your wisdom is boundless and absolute!” Celon cried, watching as one of her tentacles raised itself up and pointed towards his chest. It drew closer and closer, until its gleaming tip was but a hair’s width away from his body, pointing directly at his pounding heart.
“I assumed as much...” Nyllyn said, slowly withdrawing the tentacle. “Need I remind you, Celon, that you renounced your loyalty to the Hierophant years ago, and instead pledged it to me. An apostate like you is in no position to be doubting allegiances.”
“Yes, I understand, mistress. Please, forgive me...” Celon said, his trembling body groveling beneath Nyllyn’s presence.
“You... are forgiven, Celon,” Nyllyn said. “We need not rely on the Cabal to further our own research. The ramblings of that... dogmatic charlatan... are useless to us. Even with our progress stifled, we are still striving towards knowledge the Hierophant could never conceive of.”
“Very good, mistress, very good...” Celon said, nodding rapidly. “Again, I apologize for doubting you. This stagnation in our operations has made many of your followers... uneasy. Orvizo has been especially restless. He is adamant on having us continue our search for the Melloi artifact.”
“The Quantum Stake, yes? I admire his persistence on locating it,” Nyllyn said. A chuckle, barely loud enough to be heard over the ambiance of the ship, was released from her helmet’s vocal emitter. “We will have to track it down, eventually, but rushing our experiments now will do us no good.”
Nyllyn approached the viewport once again, her cloak opening as one of her organic limbs emerged from it, her stygian flesh sheathed in a light-devouring aura. Her arm, stretched and contorted to an inhuman degree, reached towards the bottom crest of the black hole’s corona. Black sludge, swirling with the vestiges of latent dark energy, dripped from her sharpened fingertips as they curled around the edges of the singularity.
“I have yet to grasp the Sentient’s true nature, or the nature of the quantum fluctuations that accompany it,” she said. Even through the electronic distortion of her helmet, wistfulness corroded the edges of her words. “Until that changes, there is little else we can do.”
“...I understand, mistress,” Celon said, bowing. “That’s all I have to report on, at the moment, so I’ll leave you to-”
“Aah!” Just as Celon was about to turn around, a sharp cry rang out from Nyllyn’s helmet. She collapsed to her knees and clutched her head, groaning in pain. Searing flashes of light, contorted into unknowable shapes, barraged her augmented vision, while an ear-splitting tone shrieked in her ears. Indicator lights blinked incessantly all over her helmet’s circuitry, signaling that its sensory apparatuses were being overloaded.
“Mistress!” Celon cried, rushing to Nyllyn’s side. His voice only registered as a muted mumble to her.
“I-It speaks... after so many years of silence, it speaks to me again...” Nyllyn said, withdrawing her hand from her helmet and reaching towards the image of the black hole. Her helmet’s auxiliary systems soon came online, refining the deluge of sensations into something more comprehensible. “Canalizing datastream... decoding emission sequence...” Nyllyn muttered, her helmet’s antennae twitching and blinking rapidly.
"The Sentient has shown you guidance, mistress! Oh, what glory! What magnificence!" Celon exclaimed, his eyes wide. His zealous jubilation was more than enough to overpower the terror he was experiencing.
“Yes... Yes, I see it, now...” The flashing lights began to slow and shape themselves into cohesive forms, her cybernetic systems transforming the singularity’s radiation bursts into miraculous revelations. She saw glimpses of an immense structure surrounding a star, massive blocks of blue-gray metal interlinked with each-other. The image of a downward triangle surrounding an orb, pulsing with the heartbeat of spacetime. This all gave way to the image of a human, unrecognizable and blurry, but someone that Nyllyn could sense from thousands of light years away.
“Oh Sentient... how gracious you are... how thankful I am to have received your guidance...” Nyllyn said, locking eyes with the black hole. “I will do as you ask. I will follow your guidance to the ends of the universe itself. Oh, inscrutable will, inconceivable Void, thank you!” she bellowed. There was another blinding flash of light, and then, the emissions ceased. The visions faded, and Nyllyn’s sight returned to normal.
“Mistress...” Celon knelt down beside the shaking, prostrated figure of his superior. “Are you alright? What has the Sentient told you?” he asked.
“I’m... fine,” Nyllyn said, slowly rising back to her feet. Her arms and tentacles retreated back into the confines of her cloak as she regained her towering, solemn poise. “We have new priorities, Celon. Follow me to the bridge. We must set course for Consolidate space immediately.”
"Consolidate space? Why?” Celon followed Nyllyn dutifully as she turned around and began to walk out of the sanctum. His feet kept up a brisk pace to match her slow, long strides towards the exit.
"I saw visions of someone. A human, on the Consolidate Dyson Sphere. If their image is echoing through the eyes of the Sentient, they must be affected by its guidance, too,” Nyllyn explained. ”We must find them before they attract the ire of the Cabal. An opportunity like this cannot be squandered.”
"The Sphere... Mistress, why would the Sentient choose someone from the Consolidate to carry out its will?” Celon asked.
“I cannot say, but this individual will likely walk a path that we must follow. They will be drawn to search for a fragment of the inconceivable truth.” Nyllyn said, waiting as the circular hatch leading out of the sanctum slowly spiraled open. “Perhaps, even now, they are already searching...”
