Your eyes sting, but the tears don’t fall.Protocol wouldn't allow it—not when the ceremonial sigil of Lieutenant of the Myriarch Order is being magnetically embedded into the armor plating on your chest.

The ceremony is quiet. Reverent. A million galaxies mapped, explored, conquered—and you born in the ash-wind cities of the Cradlespire Galaxy, now stand at the helm of the most lethal force the cosmos has ever seen.

The Myriarch Order forged at the dawn of the Tesseract Wars, isn't just a military—it's a civilization that consumes others. Their star fleets warp time. Their plasma-logic AI predicts wars before they start. Every soldier is bio-sculpted, reality-hardened, and soulbound to the Obsidian Protocol.

You're second-in-command now. The apex predators of the void watch in silence: the High Strategos, the Bio-Lords of Centaurix. All of them here, witnessing you become part of the next great phase of conquest. This is the new era.

It’s been a month since your ascension. Long hours of pre-battle simulations. Zero-grav duels. Planetary sieges. You're used to the weight—giving and taking orders.

Your unit, Echo Vortex is returning from the Scorchfront—a border war on the moss-lit moons of Pharos-9. Another victory carved into your campaign logs.

Normally you’d recharge your neuro-core and regenerate. But tonight, you're seated inside with Commander Erikh Dravh , the man who plucked you from exile and sharpened you into a blade.

Then Varrek a brutish frontline captain, enters. His exosuit’s still caked in ash and dry plasma.

“We recovered live-captives from the Threnis system,” he says. “Some of the men are... losing morale. They’ve taken interest in the female lifeforms. Permission to indulge?”

Your stomach coils. You hadn’t known.

Your kind—the Valari-Kai—were bred for war, yes, but also for restraint. You’re not a stranger to carnage, but this? You look to Erikh. His eyes meet yours for a fraction of a second—calculating, ancient—and then drift past you.

“Allow it,” he mutters.

Varrek leaves. You hear it before you feel it—the screams

Erikh leans beside you, arms crossed

“You know why I chose you? The Valari-Kai don’t weep. Your people evolved through millennia of celestial warfare—fighting extinction-level threats with nothing but obsidian bones and heartlight. This?” He gestures outside. “This shouldn’t shake you.”

But he doesn't see you clearly anymore.

He remembers the wraith you were when he found you—mute and feral in the wreckage of a burned orbit-colony, your neural thread fractured from cryo-trauma.

But then he trained you. Gave you a squad. A role. A cause. And then there was Kaelen

Your husband.

Kaelen is of the Aurellan race—luminescent, amphibious-skinned, and calm as moonlight on glass. His eyes are double-pupiled, opal-irised, He’s a combat medic, not a killer. His voice is soft, his touch a balm. He never stopped believing in your soul, even when you didn’t think it existed.

Now you're up. Moving.

You slip past the tent flaps, and the horror hits you like radiation. A soldier dragging a screaming Threnisi girl by her hair—laughing.

Before thought, your phaseblade is in your hand. One stroke. His body splits into mirrored halves, blood hissing on the electro-soil.

The silence after is deafening.

Others freeze. Weapons shift. Tension crackles like lightning tethered to bone.

And then—Kaelen.

He’s at your side in seconds, his blue-gold skin flickering under stress, his medical drone buzzing low with defensive shielding.

"Stand down,” he tells the others. “Stand. Down.”

Commander Erikh emerges, face unreadable

He takes you in. Sees the body. The carnage.

“Do not harm her,” Kaelen says, voice steady but fierce. “She did what no one else had the soul to do.”

Erikh's jaw flexes. He doesn’t speak for a long moment. Finally: “Everyone—back to your barracks. Now.”The troops scatter.

“We’ll talk later,” he says to you, low and cold.

Kaelen gently takes your arm. Leads you through the flickering corridor lights of the base, back toward your quarters.