To be nameless is to be forgotten. When forgotten, one might as well have never been. But what of those who persist, lingering beyond memory’s reach? What of those erased, yet still unbroken, defying oblivion itself?

  -Unknown, Pre-System Fragment, Recovered from the Abyss Archives

  The Voidship was already dead, but it wouldn’t stop screaming.

  The atmosphere of Yaerellis split before the darkness like a surgery patient’s soft skin before a scalpel—but the Doctor hadn’t bothered to use anesthesia. The sky convulsed, and the world groaned for hundreds of miles around. Those with the appropriate abilities to hear it clasped their hands to their ears to dull the horrified cries of their planet.

  Alor, a dwarf, heard the painful cries of rock and stone before the shockwave reached him. The dwarf had been surveying a recently scouted cave system after explorers reported the tell-tale signs of mithril: a faint glow in the darkness. Unlike iron or copper, the highly reflective sheen returned their light sources—no tarnish or oxidization. That alone would have been enough to send a Dwarven Expeditionary Miners Union member. Still, the report also indicated a faint hum and low frequency of singing from the seam when they employed magic in the area.

  Only large seams of mithril sang in magic's presence, so Alor had been dispatched to investigate. He had crawled through fissures, descended hundreds of feet of rope, and butchered dozens of nasty cave dwellers in his descent, but he’d done it. He’d found the motherload of mithril.

  “Do you see this?” Alor asked the camera mounted next to the light on his brow. Alor’s Pathfinder’s Insight identified it as Mithril Seam—Gigantic. In short order, the System would provide him with a much more detailed analysis.

  “Ah! You see, this is what I was saying! We’ll be rich!” Another voice said, crackling through the small transmitter in Alor’s ear.

  Then the world cried, and the sound-dampening features of his transmitters did nothing to protect his hearing. Alor slapped his hands to his ears, and the earth shook.

  The tremors were so powerful that they felt less like an earthquake and more like a shift within reality itself. The air crackled with unnatural energy, and the transmitters in his ears screeched an unholy static that felt like someone had driven a pickaxe into his brain via the ear canal.

  Alor didn’t see the streak of fire that those on the surface saw. He missed witnessing the streak of raw entropy that tore through the heavens. Dozens of miles away, in safety, his co-worker at the Dwarven Expeditionary Miners Union stared out a circular window and tried to find an explanation for what his eyes saw. It wasn’t a meteor, nor a star, but a monolithic Voidship wreathed in fire and a corona of violet. It left a ravaged sky in its wake, and the screaming? It grew louder, higher. The ship screamed so loudly that the citizens of Winvale experienced bleeding from the ears.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Many would be haunted by the sound for the rest of their lives, especially in the quiet moments in the darkest of nights.

  It struck the tiny mountains, almost more like hills outside of Winvale, with the force of a god’s wrath. A shockwave blasted outward with so much fury that entire peaks crumbled to dust before the waves of destruction reached them. They were reduced so much that no one would ever again debate if they were a hill or a mountain. The caverns beneath—and the mithril vein that would make Alor rich—shattered like glass beneath a hammer.

  The gloriously pure, untouched mithril did not bend nor break. It should have withstood the impact force, but this wasn’t a natural disaster. Something was wrong.

  When the black ship crashed through the seam, the mithril didn’t just break—it ceased to exist. The seam, the ore, and the veins running through the cavern instantly vanished. Not vaporized, not stolen, but erased. Every speck of mithril was unmade as if it had never existed. It left behind a gaping wound in the bedrock.

  A gaping wound that contained the monolithic Voidship.

  Alor’s transmitters hit the stone floor of the cavern, accompanied by a deluge of blood from his ears. Blood seeped from his eyes and nose, too. His whole, stout, dwarven body vibrated violently as if he’d been thrown into a drink mixer. Alor felt pain he’d never felt before as hairline fractures manifested in his skull. His limbs spasmed beyond his control.

  He managed to blink some of the blood from his eyes, and although his vision was impaired, he could still make out the black monolithic thing that nestled where his vein of mithril had been.

  Then the ship dissolved.

  No explosions, no inferno, not even a burst of heat. Unknown black materials that seemed almost life-like twisted in on themselves in dimensions that defied the laws of physics before they winked out of reality. Debris—fragments of the unknown black alloy phased in and out of existence, twinkling like dying stars, then faded altogether.

  Somewhere in the vastness of the void, Alor heard gibbering rise from thousands of maws filled with row after row of razor-sharp teeth. He heard, despite nothing else making noise, and it hurt him in a way he didn’t understand. Distance had no meaning, and the teeth wanted to rupture his skin and inject something into his blood.

  With it went the terrible, the awful screaming of the Voidship ceased, and Alor narrowly escaped.

  No debris remained. Not a single indication still existed that anything had ever even crashed into the mountain—beyond the vanished peak, the massive wound in the bedrock, or the thousands of citizens of Winvale.

  Had Alor imagined it all? He certainly hadn’t imagined the wounds that were rapidly dimming his vision.

  The Voidship—and his mithril—were gone.

  But what was that left behind in the center of the empty void? A single human. A man.

  That couldn’t be right, though, could it? His hands were slick with his own blood. His ears rang with a high-pitched wail that would not stop, and when he blinked, the world was stained in crimson. Alor had seen magic, he had seen war, he had even seen gods descending from the heavens—but this? This was something else. Sounds with no names, wounds in the air, oblivion consumed a mountain, and a ship from the Void had.. what? Returned to the void?

  Alor’s Pathfinder’s Insight identified the sprawled lump as Cyrus – Level 00. Alor’s vision dimmed.