VOL. 1: CHAPTER 0: THE FALLOUT
Some disasters arrive like a siren.
Some arrive like a rumor.
This one arrived like a prayer misheard.
Long before Kaloi's City earned its new title, before it became Quarantine City in government memos and terrified group chats, before the news anchors learned how to pronounce the names of its neighborhoods like they were reading foreign scripture, there was an unseen place that wasn't a place at all.
A seam.
A pressure line in reality.
A thin, stubborn boundary that held back something older than language.
And on the far side of that boundary, buried beneath layers of nothing, sealed in Level 0 of what people would someday call The Abyss, existed an unseen realm known as THE EVENT HORIZON.
Not a black hole. Not a metaphor.
A threshold.
A locked door that still had heat leaking through the cracks.
The source of power for the Starborne was not lightning or fire, not bloodline or blessing.
It was SOL.
Not "sun." Not "solar."
SOL as in soul. Aura. Qi. Breath-of-being.
A near-invisible force that threaded through everything alive, and a few things that weren't.
SOL was the reason a mother could feel her baby kick before the doctor could detect a heartbeat.
SOL was the reason crowds could shift moods like weather.
SOL was the reason some people walked into a room and it felt like the temperature changed, even if the thermostat swore nothing happened.
But SOL, in its purest form, wasn't meant to be used.
It was meant to be lived.
Only… Kaloi's City was full of people who had spent their lives being forced to become tools.
So when SOL finally found a crack in the world big enough to seep through, it didn't settle gently.
It spilled.
And the first ones to feel it weren't saints.
They were survivors.
1) THE MYTH BEFORE THE STREET
In the unseen realm, something watched.
Not with eyes. Eyes were too small a concept.
It watched with gravity. With hunger. With inevitability.
The Event Horizon didn't speak, but it pulled on things.
Ideas. Anger. Ambition. Trauma. Love.
It pulled on them the way the ocean pulls on the moon, a slow insistence you don't notice until tides swallow the shore.
There were rules in the old tongue. Laws written into creation long before anyone called it physics.
No power comes without exchange.
No awakening comes without rupture.
No gift comes without an appetite attached.
And the appetite was waking up.
SOL drifted in Kaloi's City like perfume you couldn't name.
Not everybody noticed it. Most people only felt it as a restless irritability, as if their skin had become too tight for their bones.
But in certain bloodlines, in certain scars, in certain hearts that had been forced to harden too soon…
SOL found purchase.
It hooked.
It threaded.
It began to rewrite.
The first Starborne didn't explode into glory.
They broke.
Quietly.
Internally.
Like glass stressed by heat.
And then… they remade themselves.
2) THE STREET BEFORE THE BLAST
Kaloi's City had always been loud, but the last few weeks had carried a different frequency.
Sirens weren't just sirens anymore.
They sounded like forewarnings.
Helicopters didn't just circle for show.
They hovered like vultures with taxes and badges.
Everywhere you went, there were eyes. Cameras. Phone lenses. Security domes outside government buildings like polished threats.
People didn't call it oppression out loud. Not like that.
They called it "policy."
They called it "precaution."
They called it "keeping order."
But the city was a living thing, and it knew when it was being choked.
The sun that morning came up pale, washed-out, like it had been rubbed with ash.
Sionu Harajin rode through it anyway.
He was twenty-five and moved like someone who'd learned early that hesitation cost you.
His bike wasn't expensive, but it was faithful: matte-black frame, thin scars in the paint, the kind of machine you kept alive because it kept you alive.
A courier's life wasn't glamorous.
It was legs burning up stairwells.
It was shoulders heavy with bags full of other people's urgency.
It was riding through neighborhoods where the street names changed but the danger didn't.
Sionu's hoodie was up, not because it was cold, but because being seen too clearly in Kaloi's City was a gamble. His eyes, a striking gold against his dark skin, were the kind people noticed and then pretended they didn't because staring in the wrong area could get you checked.
His backpack was strapped tight.
His phone buzzed every few minutes.
Jobs stacked like dominoes.
He moved through traffic like he was arguing with it.
Some days, he felt like the city itself was trying to test him.
Today, the city felt like it was waiting.
At a red light, a group of teens leaned against the wall of a corner store, postures casual but attention sharp. One of them watched Sionu like he recognized him, like he wanted to ask something but didn't know how to say it without sounding soft in front of his friends.
Across the street, an old man on a bench stared into nowhere, lips moving.
Prayer, maybe.
Or counting.
A police cruiser crawled by slow, the way predators move when they want you to remember they exist.
Sionu breathed in and out, keeping his face unreadable.
It wasn't fear.
Not exactly.
It was awareness, sharpened to a blade.
He glanced down at his phone.
Another delivery. Another address.
Another run.
He pushed off when the light turned green, bike rolling forward, chain whispering, tires kissing cracked asphalt.
As he rode, he felt it again.
That strange pressure in the air.
Like static, but not on his skin.
Inside him.
Like the universe had reached into his chest and tugged on a thread it hadn't touched before.
He swallowed, jaw flexing.
"Not today," he muttered, like he could negotiate with whatever that was.
He didn't know he'd been negotiating his whole life.
3) THE LOVE BEFORE THE RUIN
Blitz Jalid's laugh was the kind that made the room forgive itself.
Even when she wasn't laughing, her presence carried heat, the kind you felt near a kettle before it screamed.
She was in their apartment when Sionu finally got home between runs, standing barefoot on the kitchen tile in shorts and an oversized tee, hair wrapped up in a scarf like she was trying to keep the day from tangling her.
The place was small, but it was theirs.
A couch with a blanket that had survived too much.
A table with one leg slightly shorter than the others.
A window that looked out over the city like the city was an argument happening outside.
Blitz was stirring something in a pot, and the smell of spices hit Sionu like a hand pulling him back to life.
"You late," she said without turning, voice sharp with affection.
"I'm alive," he answered, dropping his bag on the chair.
"That's not what I asked."
He grinned despite himself, leaning to kiss the side of her head. She smelled like coconut oil and heat and something stubborn.
"You always wanna be right," he murmured.
"I always am right," Blitz replied, flicking her eyes at him. "Sit down before you fall down."
He did. The chair creaked under his weight like it was complaining.
Blitz placed a bowl in front of him, and he realized he hadn't eaten since dawn.
He dug in.
For a few minutes, the world shrank to food and the sound of her moving around the kitchen, humming under her breath.
Then Blitz spoke again, quieter.
"You been feeling it?"
Sionu paused mid-bite.
"What?"
"That… pressure." She tapped her chest lightly with two fingers. "Like something in the air. Like the city's holding its breath."
Sionu's eyes lifted.
Blitz wasn't the type to talk like that unless she meant it. She was grounded. Practical. The kind of woman who didn't waste words on superstition.
He set his spoon down carefully.
"Yeah," he admitted. "I been feeling it."
Blitz leaned against the counter, arms crossed.
"I don't like it," she said. "Feels like… like something big coming."
Sionu forced a smirk, trying to lighten it.
"Girl, something big always coming in Kaloi's City. Rent. Bills. Police. Some dude trying to test you at the gas station."
Blitz didn't smile.
"Sionu."
He exhaled.
"Okay," he said softly. "Okay. I hear you."
They looked at each other for a moment, and the air between them tightened.
Love wasn't just romance. It was a pact.
A quiet agreement to keep each other from drowning.
Blitz walked over, sat on the arm of the couch, and rested her hand on his shoulder.
"Just promise me," she said, voice low, "you ain't doing nothing stupid out there."
Sionu's throat tightened.
He wanted to tell her yes.
He wanted to tell her the truth.
But the truth was he didn't always know what was stupid until after the consequences.
He covered her hand with his.
"I promise," he said anyway.
It wasn't a lie.
It was a wish.
4) THE FRIEND BEFORE THE SHIFT
Ultimo Uthman called Sionu's phone like a storm knocking.
Sionu answered on the second ring.
"What's good?" Ultimo's voice came through, fast and slightly breathless, like he'd been running or pacing.
Ultimo didn't sound like panic yet.
But he was close enough that Sionu's spine straightened.
"Where you at?" Sionu asked.
"Near Fort Trigg," Ultimo said. "By the west cut-through. They got military out here, bro. Like actual military. Not the fake tough dudes in riot gear. I mean real."
Sionu frowned.
"That's new."
"That's what I'm saying," Ultimo replied. "And listen… people acting weird. Like… twitchy. I seen a lady screaming at a mailbox. A dude punched a stop sign till his knuckles looked like raw meat."
"Drugs," Sionu said automatically.
Ultimo clicked his tongue.
"Nah. This ain't that. This something else."
Sionu looked at Blitz. She was watching him, brows drawn.
"What you want me to do?" Sionu asked.
Ultimo hesitated.
That alone put cold water in Sionu's veins.
"I need you to come through," Ultimo said finally. "Just… just be around. Something feels off. And I don't trust this."
Sionu glanced at the clock.
He had another delivery in thirty.
But Ultimo didn't call asking for company.
Ultimo called when the world was about to do something ugly.
"I'll be there," Sionu said.
"Bet," Ultimo replied, relief like a crack in his voice. "And bro… bring that thing."
Sionu went still.
"You mean…"
"You know what I mean," Ultimo said. "Just in case."
Sionu didn't answer right away.
Blitz's hand tightened slightly on his shoulder.
"Sionu," she said, warning.
He met her eyes.
A silent conversation happened. A whole argument in one glance.
Then he looked back down at the phone.
"Yeah," he said to Ultimo. "I got you."
He hung up.
Blitz stood up, suddenly restless, pacing in a tight line.
"I don't like this," she repeated.
Sionu rose too, grabbing his hoodie.
"Just a check-in," he said. "I'll come right back."
Blitz turned, eyes fierce.
"Don't treat me like I'm stupid. You can hear it in his voice. Something's happening."
Sionu swallowed.
"Blitz…"
She stepped close, finger pressed against his chest, right where she said she felt the pressure.
"Promise me again," she whispered, like it cost her pride to ask.
Sionu's mouth opened.
Then, without warning, the air in the room seemed to shiver.
Not the walls.
Not the floor.
The space.
A vibration like reality briefly forgot how to be stable.
Blitz froze, eyes widening.
Sionu's breath caught.
Outside, distant, a car alarm began to wail.
Then another.
Then another.
As if something had walked past them, unseen, and every machine recognized it as danger.
Blitz's voice came out thin.
"Do you feel that?"
Sionu's eyes were locked on the window.
He could see the city skyline, and for a split second, he swore the light above the buildings flickered like a dying candle.
"I feel it," he said.
And deep inside his chest, something that had been dormant his whole life shifted.
As if it had been waiting for a cue.
5) THE PACKAGE BEFORE THE APOCALYPSE
The "thing" Ultimo mentioned wasn't a gun. Not exactly.
It was a small canister tucked in a false compartment under Sionu's courier bag. A delivery he never opened, never questioned, because he'd been paid too much money not to.
He told himself it was medicine.
He told himself it was tech.
He told himself it was nothing that could haunt him.
But when he strapped the bag on, the weight felt different.
Not heavier.
Guilty.
Blitz watched him from the doorway, arms folded, face carved into stone.
"You coming back," she said, not a question.
"I'm coming back," Sionu answered.
Blitz nodded once, like she was stamping the promise into law.
Sionu stepped out into the hall.
The building's air was stale, but today it carried something metallic, like a storm about to break.
He walked down the stairs, each step echoing.
Outside, the city hit him with its noise, but underneath the noise was another sound, so low you felt it more than heard it.
A hum.
He mounted his bike and pushed off.
As he rode toward Fort Trigg, the streets looked like someone had turned the saturation down on life.
People moved in clusters, talking too loud, laughing too hard.
Overcompensating.
A group of kids stood around a street vendor, but none of them were buying. Just staring. Like the vendor was selling answers and they didn't know how to pay.
At an intersection, a man in a suit screamed into his phone, voice cracking. A woman across the street was crying while smiling, like her emotions had gotten mixed in a blender.
SOL was in the air.
But nobody had language for it yet.
Sionu pedaled harder.
He didn't know he was carrying more than a package.
He was carrying a spark.
6) THE EXPLOSION
Fort Trigg sat like a clenched fist at the edge of Kaloi's City, a military complex that had always been there, always watching, always reminding people who the government believed truly owned the land.
Today, it looked different.
More soldiers. More vehicles. More barricades.
The kind of presence that didn't prevent danger.
It announced it.
Ultimo was by the west cut-through, pacing, hands in his hoodie pocket. His hair was short, black, with three green streaks that made him easy to spot in a crowd. He looked like he'd been carved from tension.
When he saw Sionu, relief flashed across his face, but it didn't soften him.
"You see this?" Ultimo said, pointing toward the barricades.
Sionu nodded.
"What they doing?"
Ultimo's jaw clenched.
"I don't know. But I heard some people talking… they saying something got out. Or something woke up."
Sionu scoffed, but it sounded weak.
"People always saying something."
Ultimo grabbed Sionu's shoulder, grip tight.
"Bro," he said, low. "I'm serious. My skin been crawling since this morning. Like… like I'm about to be struck by lightning but the sky clear."
Sionu's eyes narrowed at that phrasing.
Lightning.
Why did that word feel like it had teeth?
Before he could respond, a tremor ran through the ground.
Not an earthquake.
A pulse.
A single heartbeat from something too large to fit in the world.
The soldiers near the barricade shouted, weapons raised, scanning the air like they expected an enemy to materialize from nothing.
People in the street stopped moving.
For a moment, even the city seemed to go quiet.
Then, somewhere ahead, there was a flash.
Bright enough to bleach the world.
Sionu blinked, and in that blink, time warped.
He saw the canister under his bag like it was suddenly highlighted in his mind.
He saw Blitz's eyes.
He saw Ultimo's green streaks.
He saw himself from a distance, like a character somebody else wrote.
And then the explosion hit.
It wasn't just fire.
It was light.
A violent bloom that swallowed sound, swallowed air, swallowed physics, expanding outward with the wrath of a new sun being born in the wrong place.
The shockwave slammed into Sionu like a giant hand.
He felt his bike rip out from under him.
He flew.
For a fraction of a second, he was weightless, suspended in the air like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Then his back hit the ground.
Hard.
His skull bounced.
His vision fractured into shards of white and red.
He tried to breathe.
His lungs refused.
The world roared back in as sound returned, but it returned distorted, like someone had put cotton in reality's ears.
People were screaming.
Metal was tearing.
Glass was raining.
Sionu rolled, trying to push himself up, but his arms shook like they belonged to someone else.
Ultimo's voice was somewhere, shouting his name, but it sounded distant, underwater.
And then Sionu saw it.
The canister.
It had torn free from his bag in the blast. It rolled across the street, clinking softly like a coin in a church.
One soldier saw it and reached for it.
The moment his glove touched the canister, it split open.
A thin plume of something near-invisible poured out.
Not smoke.
Not gas.
A shimmer.
Like heat haze, but wrong.
It slid into the air and then into people.
Not through their skin, but through their SOL.
The effect wasn't immediate.
It was worse.
It was delayed just long enough for hope to exist.
The soldier jerked, eyes widening, mouth opening like he wanted to scream but couldn't.
His skin began to glow faintly, veins lighting up like a map of poisoned rivers.
He fell to his knees.
Then he laughed.
A high, terrified laugh.
Sionu stared, horrified, trying to crawl backward.
But the shimmer was already moving.
It drifted toward him like destiny.
Ultimo stumbled toward Sionu, reaching for him.
"Sionu!" he shouted.
Sionu tried to speak.
Tried to warn him.
Tried to say don't touch it.
But his mouth only filled with blood.
The shimmer reached him.
For a second, it hovered near his face.
And in that second, something inside Sionu recognized it.
Not as a stranger.
As a key.
It entered him.
And the world went black.
7) THE EVENT HORIZON OPENS
In the darkness, Sionu didn't dream.
He fell.
Not down. Not up.
Sideways, through layers of reality that peeled apart like paper soaked in water.
He couldn't feel his body.
But he could feel his SOL.
And his SOL was screaming.
He saw a horizon line made of nothing.
A threshold that curved like the edge of a planet.
On the far side, there was not a void.
There was presence.
A pressure so enormous it felt like worship.
The Event Horizon didn't speak, but it acknowledged him.
It knew his blood.
His lineage.
His dragon-buried inheritance.
His human stubbornness.
It knew the crack in him where guilt lived.
It pressed there.
And something answered.
Electricity wasn't born in that moment.
It was unlocked.
It surged through him like an ancient river reclaiming its path.
He convulsed in the darkness, but the darkness was not empty.
It was full of watchers.
Full of potential.
Full of hunger.
And then a voice, not spoken aloud, but etched into his soul like lightning scar:
WELCOME HOME, STARBORNE.
Sionu tried to scream.
Instead, the electricity screamed for him.
8) THE AFTERMATH BEGINS
When Sionu's eyes opened again, the world was ash.
Smoke crawled across the street like a living thing.
Sirens wailed, but they sounded far away, like the city didn't know whether to cry or fight.
Bodies lay scattered, some unmoving, some twitching, some laughing in broken ways.
Ultimo was on his knees nearby, coughing, eyes wide, hands shaking.
He looked at Sionu like he wasn't sure Sionu was real.
"Sionu…" Ultimo whispered.
Sionu tried to respond.
His throat burned.
His entire body felt like it had been rewired with barbed wire.
He looked down at his hands.
For a moment, faint sparks danced across his fingertips.
Blue-white.
Alive.
Sionu's breath hitched.
"No," he rasped.
Ultimo's eyes darted around.
"We gotta go," Ultimo said, voice cracking. "We gotta get outta here. They about to blame us for this. You know they are."
Sionu's head pounded.
Blitz.
His mind snapped to her like a rubber band.
He tried to stand.
His legs trembled, but he forced himself up, teeth clenched.
In the distance, more soldiers poured in.
Behind them, something else.
People.
Civilians.
But they weren't moving right.
They walked in strange angles, like puppets with crooked strings.
One of them turned its head toward Sionu.
Its eyes glowed faintly.
And it smiled.
Not friendly.
Recognizing.
Sionu's stomach dropped.
Ultimo grabbed his arm.
"Sionu, MOVE!"
Sionu stumbled, half-running, half-dragging himself, and as they fled into the smoke, he felt the electricity inside him flare, reacting to fear like it enjoyed it.
Behind them, Kaloi's City began to collapse into something new.
Something quarantined.
Something lawless.
Something hungry.
And in the unseen realm beyond the Event Horizon, the Abyss pulsed once, like a satisfied heartbeat.
The door had cracked open.
And the world had felt it.
to be continued...