The skies over Volarria were clear that night, tinged in soft gold from the hovering lights of the capital. Towers climbed like fingers into the clouds. Streets glowed. Machines whispered. And across the great city, an unshakable silence had settled—the kind that follows after all the screams have faded.

  To the ruling caste, it was peace.

  To the two figures working in secret beneath the ruined observatory dome, it was death.

  Not the kind brought by fire or plague. A quieter death—erasure. Friends had vanished. Families rewritten. Names redacted. Truth deleted. The Architects had learned that bullets were crude; silence was cleaner. History itself had been cored out and sealed away, replaced by obedience.

  They knew their time was running out.

  The man held their infant son close, his face lit by the soft glow of the stasis cradle; an escape pod designed to save their child. Beside him, the mother adjusted the last of the guidance crystals. Her hands were steady, but her breath trembled.

  “They’ll come for us soon,” she whispered. “We’ve failed to hide.”

  “I saw it in our neighbor’s face,” the man replied. “They’re trying to figure out if we're a part of the rebellion or not.”

  He kissed the baby’s brow. “We’ll vanish before dawn. Just like the rest.”

  “But he won’t,” she said, voice cracking.

  No—he wouldn’t.

  Beside the cradle lay a creature no larger than a terran pup. It was warm, breathing, soft to the touch. But beneath its black fur & amber eyes lay complexity beyond reckoning. Engineered, not born. Designed to grow, not remain static. Built to learn, to hunt, to guard—and above all, to protect the child with it's life.

  Its instincts were unshakable. Its body would mature in tandem with the child. Its mind held the entire history of Volarria, including the truths the nobility believed they had destroyed forever. And more than knowledge, it held something rarer still: will.

  “Do you remember your name?” the mother asked, stroking its flank.

  “I have no name,” the creature answered, voice smooth and low. “He will give me one.”

  “You’ll protect him?”

  “With my life.”

  “You’ll feed him? Raise him?”

  “I will gather. Hunt. Teach. He will not be alone.”

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  The father laid the child in the cradle, swaddled in nutrient cloth. The creature stepped in after, curling beside the boy. Two heartbeats. Two lives sealed together.

  “We don’t know when or where the pod will land,” the father said. “You may sleep for years.”

  “I will wake when needed.” The pup replied.

  “And when he’s ready?”

  “I will speak.”

  They lingered, eyes fixed on the pod’s surface. The mother’s hand rested on the glass, trembling in the dim observatory lights looking up to the moons.

  “I wish it could be different,” she murmured. “I wish we could raise him here… under the red sun.”

  The father’s eyes shone with something darker than fear. “He’ll never see the three moons. Never feel the bloomwinds. Never hear the deepcallers sing.”

  “All the things we wanted to show him… they’ll live in stories now,” she said.

  “He’ll carry them,” the father whispered. “He’ll carry us.”

  The pod sealed with a soft pulse of light.

  No countdown.

  Not even enough time for a single tear to fall from their cheeks.

  Just a breath and a hum—and then it was gone, lost to the stars.

  The pod slipped silently through the void for centuries, riding the pull of distant gravity wells and forgotten mathematics. It passed stars that had yet to be named. Within, the infant slept. And the guardian beside him, still small, still waiting.

  As it approached its destination, a solar flare lashed out from a young, volatile star. The electromagnetic burst struck the pod’s sensor array. Seconds later, a micrometeor—no larger than a coin—pierced the rear communications node. Two errors, one forgotten redundancy, and the wake-cycle never triggered.

  The pod entered Earth’s atmosphere, in a time of beasts and thunder. It struck the earth in a lush forest and sank beneath the mud.

  No alarms.

  No cries.

  Only silence.

  Seasons turned to centuries. Centuries to millennia. Forests grew and died. Mountains shifted. Oceans changed shape. Civilizations rose & fell, and through it all, the pod lay buried—undisturbed, unseen, waiting.

  That was until the hill cracked.

  A year of endless rain softened the slope. A summer storm surged over the valley. Water dug deep into the earth, and with a groan that echoed like breath returning to lungs long still, the hillside slid.

  The next morning, Elias Moore stood at the top of Black Hollow Hill, musket on his back, squinting into the fog.

  He saw the scar—a wide wound across the land, fresh and raw. Curiosity tugged at him, quiet but firm. He descended through soaked underbrush, down through broken roots and churned earth, until his boots hit soft clay.

  And there it was.

  Half-buried in mud, tangled in roots, something gleamed.

  It wasn’t wood. Not stone. Not metal, at least not any metal he had ever known. It was curved, seamless, alive in its stillness. A dark glass panel shimmered beneath a film of soil.

  Elias stepped forward without thinking.

  His hand reached out.

  He touched it.

  The moment his skin met the shell, the pod responded. A soft hum filled the air. Blue light laced across its surface. The pod hissed & steamed bubbling as the mud dried rapidly as warmth spread from within. Systems reinitialized, but the pod refused to open.

  Noticing a thin line along the trim of the glass he grabbed his hunting knife & began to pry it open.

  Upon doing so he finally got a good look inside, and he put his knife away out of habit.

  A couple seconds later the stasis field collapsed as the pod fully opened.

  Tiny lungs drew their first true breath in millennia.

  A great, coiled shape beside the child stirred and exhaled—steam rising from its skin.

  Elias staggered back, heart pounding, staring as the panel cleared. And through the misted glass, he saw a hand—small and human—press upward.

  And beside it, the silhouette of something immense, alive, and watching.