The stars had always been too quiet anyway.
But not anymore.
The order had been received.
A figure stirred, deep within the largest hive ship, now gliding through the void. Not like the others. Not in silence.
This one did not crawl from a pod or drip from the ceiling. It stepped out on its own, as if it remembered what walking meant.
The movement was slow but heavy, each step echoing through the pulsing chamber like the sound of something alive remembering how to move.
The creature was tall—taller than most of its kind, easily twice the height of a normal soldier.
Its body was armored in overlapping plates of carapace dark as the void, streaked with deep green lines and faint violet pulsing softly beneath the surface.
They weren't scars. They weren't markings of rank carved by tools. They were part of it—grown there over centuries, etched by the queen herself.
