There is a silence in deep space that even the dead would fear.
It crept like ash through the void, smothering time and thought alike. And somewhere between the dying echoes of a forgotten sun and the outer rim of the Dothran Expanse, it stirred once again.
A vessel drifted in that silence—obsidian-skinned, its insignias eroded by radiation and years of unanswered prayers. The name etched on its hull: M.I. Varaskel, under the sigil of the Matra Archaik Consortium. What remained inside was not a crew.
It was a message.
One that should not exist.
"We did not call it.
It came... for our name."
The fragment pulsed with a strange resonance. Not audio. Not visual. But meaning—pure, undistilled, and wrong. The kind that worms behind language and gnaws at the spine of understanding.
The signal had come from Delmakh-IV.
A station thought lost. A relic orbiting the dead moon of Irskallet, forgotten by chart and memory alike. Once a bastion of linguistic research and cosmic architecture—now, a myth spoken only in archived warnings and neural blacklists.
And so, a protocol was reignited.
Irivan.
The final recall directive.
....
In the core vault of Varrukhal Spire, the last council of the Matra Archaik convened in whispered emergency. Three hollowed minds encased in language-preserving vessels debated for ninety-six hours—each syllable measured, ritualized, contained.
Then, a name passed their lips for the first time in seventeen cycles.
"Kael Ruvan."
The man in question was watching snow fall within the artificial dome of Venktra's southern hemisphere. The ice mirrored old Earth's winter, though Kael had never known it outside tapes and ink. He did not look up when the directive arrived. He already knew.
The pocketwatch in his coat ticked once, then stilled.
He opened his notebook—a small, timeworn thing bound in Erasyan leather. A phrase underlined from years ago.
"To mend the broken word is to stitch the bones of gods."
Kael closed it with a sigh that did not reach his lungs. He stood.
He did not ask who else was going.
...
Three days later, the expedition shuttle Ors Valur tore through the mist-rings of Irskallet. The crew was minimal—Kael, three engineers from the Daran Fold, and a security unit named Grell-5, whose face was more machine than memory.
The starlight around Delmakh-IV fractured unnaturally, as though passing through a kaleidoscope of forgotten meanings. The station did not drift—it waited, inert yet taut, like a mouth held shut just before it screamed.
"Delmakh is cold," said Grell-5 over comms, voice filtered through layers of cognition dampeners. "There are no life signs." "There wouldn't be," Kael replied, adjusting his coat. "That station was never built for the living."
He turned to the others.
"We are not here to restore systems. We are here to listen."
The engineers exchanged glances, unsure if he was serious—or worse, poetic.
....
The docking clamps hissed as Ors Valur locked with Bay Vethra. The airlock opened not with the usual hiss of equalized pressure, but with an exhalation. The kind a crypt might release when it forgets it had been sealed.
Kael stepped in first.
The hallway was intact—smooth steel veined with fiber-glass symbols etched into the walls. Most were standard Matra script. Some were not.
The floor trembled once beneath his boots, though no sound accompanied it.
Then the lights flickered—and one illuminated corridor slowly awakened ahead.
Kael did not smile.
He simply wrote.
"It wants to be read."
....
They moved deeper.
Signs of the former crew surfaced only in tools left mid-use, open doors leading to nowhere, and an eerie pattern of personal effects—watches, journals, photographs—carefully placed at the junctions of the halls. None bore names.
No blood. No wreckage.
But the walls pulsed, almost imperceptibly, like a giant heart suffering arrhythmia.
Then came the static.
Grell-5 froze mid-step. Its vocal unit crackled, twitching with unnatural feedback.
"ERROR... I AM... NAMED..." "What?" Kael spun, but Grell's eyes had gone dark. "I AM... THE ONE YOU... NAME... ME..."
Kael's notebook trembled in his hand.
Suddenly, a faint hum rose through the corridor—like a choir underwater, trying to sing a memory they never had.
A cold sweat formed beneath Kael's collar. He turned toward the nearest panel.
There—burned into the wall with something that shimmered unnaturally in the dim light—was a sentence.
"The language you speak has been heard."
....
By the sixth hour, one of the engineers, Ralev Tonn, collapsed near Junction 3-A. Not from fatigue, but paralysis. His eyes darted frantically, and his mouth moved in silent mutterings, as if trapped mid-conversation with something not there.
Kael knelt beside him.
"Ralev... focus on me. Speak."
But Ralev did not speak.
Instead, he wrote—his finger tracing along Kael's wrist with trembling insistence.
"Don't name it."
He died moments later.
Or perhaps he vanished.
His body folded in on itself, forming something akin to a glyph—an impossible shape that bled meaning into the floor.
Kael could no longer deny it.
Something had survived in Delmakh-IV.
Not as flesh.
Not as machine.
But as name.
....
He returned to his quarters—what was once the captain's observatory, now a hollow sphere overlooking Irskallet's dead grey orbit.
He sat.
He opened his notebook.
The pocketwatch beside him remained still.
"We did not call it," he whispered. "It came... for our name."
And somewhere, between silence and the place language dies, something answered.
"Then speak me again...
So I may become."