"The most perfect war is the one no one believes is happening." - Threnody Of 8000 Clashes.
For a moment, Kali didn't know what to say. Words hovered just out of reach, a thousand instincts clashing within him.
"I… Why?" he finally managed, the question small in his throat.
Rizen's voice dropped a whisper not meant for the wind but for the weight of memory. "Sapiens were the waking thought of humanity, the first ape to dream. You stood upright not just on two feet, but on the edge of the unknown. You made fire, then stories. You shaped tools, then meaning. In doing so, you carved the path for all that followed."
He paused, then spoke more softly. "But you were not enough. You were brilliant but brittle. Your kind burned bright and fast, too fragile to hold the tools of gods. You lived short lives, ruled by instincts carved in the stone of your bones. And yet you reached for the stars."
Kali swallowed hard, shame brushing his chest, but he didn't look away.
"Astralis," Rizen continued, "was your answer to the stars. The next shape of man. Those who crossed the void and let it change them. They were forged in orbit, born in the dark between suns. Photosynthetic. Radiation-hardened. Cold-silent and long-lived. Built not just to survive space, but to belong to it. Everything you were, made enduring."
Kali's gaze dropped to the back of his hand, tracing the veins beneath the skin. He knew. Even by Rusa standards, who often lived two centuries, sometimes more with augmentation, he was a flicker. Some mutants, unbound by stability, could live for millennials.
"They sound like gods," he spoke quietly..
"They were. They are those who swallowed the void and let it rewrite their flesh," Rizen replied. "They did not cling to Earth's memory. They adapted. They endured. Their songs hum through ship-hulls and solar lattices. Their thoughts unfold across generations. They are what came next."
The silence stretched. Kali let it settle into him like dust. Then, with a breath, he asked, "How do you mean to do this?"
"I can't evolve you. Not alone."
Kali blinked. "You can't?"
"Evolution of that magnitude takes time," Rizen said. "Thousands of years. The Astralis emerged slowly, carved by selection, hardship, and the echo of hope. But you don't have time. No one does anymore. If you're to become more, it must be forced."
The word hung there, forced, with all its implications.
"And that kind of innovation," Rizen added, "is beyond me. So we must go to Umbriel."
Kali frowned. "What's in Umbriel?"
"The Cruciform Memory Tomb," Rizen said. "One of the last sealed cathedrae of the Silent Choirs. Beneath its black ice lies the Second Saturnine Mindstack."
"Where is Umbriel?" Kali asked, still trying to piece together the scale of what Rizen had just told him.
"We'll be needing a starchart for that," Rizen replied, voice dry with understatement. "Hopefully, there's be one in the Caladrian Space Station archives. I'll handle the piloting, gets complicated near the wreck zones. In the meantime, you should review the datapad."
Kali nodded and reached for the slate-gray device resting in the console's magnetic holster. Its surface flickered to life at his touch, streams of encoded data unfurling in sharp geometric patterns, intel on awakening, and class mutation.
Just as he was about to dive in, Rizen's voice cut sharply through the hum of the ship.
"I shouldn't have to remind you," he said, "but I will anyway. The databases housed in the Septate Alliance are far more advanced than anything left on Theraxis."
Kali froze.
Rizen continued. "Sapiens have been excised from public memory. Systematically. You're a ghost in their records, a blank space where a species used to be. And we don't know who still remembers. Or what. A drop of your blood might be all it takes."
"I will be careful," Kali said, voice steady, though he felt his stomach twist.
"Good," Rizen muttered. "In my day, we lorded over empires that stretched from nebula to neutron star. We ruled a thousand alien civilizations, and more often than not, we were cruel. Some still remember that. And if they discover your true identity... they may kneel in reverence." He paused, and something darker crept into his voice. "Or they may seek justice for ancient scars."
Kali met his gaze, uncertain whether to feel honored or hunted.
Rizen didn't speak again, and Kali finally lowered his eyes to the datapad and began to read.
The datapad was much more that he hoped it would be. It outlined the five stages of mutants and genome serums. Delta, gamma, beta, alpha, and omega. On the contrary, there were six orders of awakening, this meant that awakened had a higher ceiling.
The nine syllables were divided into three groups, voiced, silent, broken. Voiced: Genesis, Vow, and Ascent. These syllables were internally coherent, logical, structured, learnable. Genesis birthed form from void. Vow bound intent into law. Ascent allowed the recursive climb, evolving the self through iteration. Silent: Mirror, Distance, and Hollow. These could not be taught in the usual sense. They were felt more than understood. Mirror dealt with reflection and recursion, Distance with individuation and separation, Hollow with the space in which meaning chooses to exist. Broken: Grief, Friction, and Unname. These were dangerous syllables, destructive to mind and structure alike. Grief encoded entropy through sorrow. Friction birthed chaos through contradiction. And Unname... was beyond all of them.
Unname was the ninth syllable. It had no recorded users. According to the pad, it was not merely dangerous. Any being who fully awakened Unname vanished from perception and record. No trace, no echo. Only the Homo Deus, the final step of human evolution, were said to have mastered it.
Kali shivered.
Deeper still, he found something more personal: the techniques rooted in Grief. Some he recognized, like The Touch of Despair, which he'd used on Colt, a psychic lash that collapsed the will of its target into mourning. There was also Memory Imprint, a technique that allowed the infliction of pain and sorrow by binding trauma into objects, weaponizing memory itself.
Other techniques were listed, many far more advanced, sketched only in abstract terms. Their usage required resonance, emotional clarity, and in some cases, self-inflicted suffering.
Much of the intel beyond the Fourth Order was fragmented, redacted, or deliberately vague. Descriptions turned poetic, paradoxical. He caught phrases like soul-as-language and consciousness tunneling, but nothing solid.
One thing troubled him, a note in the margins. A warning.
"A profound gap lies between the Third and Fourth Orders. The Fourth and above are not merely levels, but thresholds. You cross them at cost."
As Kali read on, the hum of the engines softened, and the ship began to decelerate. Through the forward viewport, a colossal silhouette emerged from the void, the Caladrian Station.
Rizen guided the vessel with practiced silence, threading it through a corridor of traffic that pulsed like veins around a titan's heart.
Caladrian was not just a station. It was a world unto itself, the largest orbital construct in the Ecliptica Rho star system and the undisputed seat of power for the Septate Alliance. Spanning dozens of miles in every direction, it was a sprawl of spires, docks, habitat rings, and data vaults, all suspended in geosynchronous orbit beyond the second planet's grasp.
It floated like a cathedral of steel and plasma, constantly shifting with the needs of its many inhabitants, ambassadors, pirates, xenogeneticists, and memory brokers. Its gravity-well towers glowed like suns. Its defensive turrets were quiet, but visible. Watching.
By galactic standards, it was remarkably close to the Chalice-Thanis system, the system that housed Theraxis. That ancient ruin was now a ghost in space, but here... here was power consolidated. Alive. Ambitious.
Around the central star of Ecliptica Rho, an armada of Dyson swarms orbited in elegant precision, satellites, energy harvesters, and mirror arrays capturing stellar radiation and feeding it back to the station and its client systems.
To Kali, the sight was staggering, a cosmic chandelier of mirrored light, a living architecture far beyond anything he had seen on Theraxis. He found himself leaning forward, eyes wide, breath caught in his throat.
Countless vessels drifted in and out of Caladrian's docking arms, freighters the size of cities, sleek courier ships, war-torn destroyers, and impossibly massive ultra-haulers, which carried smaller ships within like matryoshka dolls of alloy and fire.
Then, as their ship merged with a final descent queue, Rizen's voice echoed softly in his mind—telepathic, measured. "We're here."
Kali said nothing. He simply stared at the shining ringworld before him, and felt, for the first time in a long time, small.