In a galaxy millions of light years from earth's own Milkyway, there exists a solar system inhabited by humans. These humans are very distant relatives of those from earth, but neither know of the distant connection between them. In fact, neither know of the others existence.
THE BOOK OF FYDOR
A Testament for Those Who Remain
Part I: The Fall of Home
Chapter One: The Last Days of the Old World
I write these words as one who has seen the end of a world. Not in the way of poets who speak of ages lost to time, nor in the manner of rulers who lament fallen empires. No, I saw my home reduced to cinders. I watched the sky split apart, the oceans seethe into mist, and the very bones of the earth fracture and crumble. I have lived to tell of it, but no part of me believes I was meant to.
The final days began not with a whisper, nor with an omen from the heavens. They came in fire, in steel, in the unrelenting light of a thousand bombardments. We had always known of the Enemy, for they lived beneath the same sun as we did, circling the great blue star on a world not unlike our own. We had known them in war, in uneasy peace, and in war again. They were much like us, though shaped by a harsher gravity, their forms heavier, their skin thick against the cold. For centuries, we had battled them in skirmishes among the moons, in the drifting stations of the asteroid belt, and, in the end, upon the very surfaces of our planets. And yet, for all the fury we unleashed upon one another, we never knew the truth. We never understood that we had not been fighting for our own survival, nor for our own ambitions. We were pieces upon a board, moved by hands we could not see.
The war’s final days were unlike anything that had come before. The fleets that once clashed in silent duels beyond the atmosphere abandoned all pretense of strategy. No more did our ships maneuver in the careful dances of void warfare. They simply descended, raining death upon the land with no regard for victory, only annihilation.
I remember the sky turning to liquid gold as orbital strikes shattered the upper atmosphere. The air itself became fire. Cities burned without smoke, their towers dissolving into molten slag before a single stone could fall. I remember the sea retreating, fleeing the land before boiling away in great clouds that never became rain. The ground, the very foundation of the world, buckled and cracked, vomiting plumes of light and ash high into the burning heavens.
There was no order to the collapse. The rulers of my people, the commanders, the sages—none of them had answers. I saw them die in palaces of glass and steel, crushed beneath the weight of their own monuments. I saw the great halls of learning crumble, the endless archives turn to drifting embers in the winds of the apocalypse. I heard the cries of my people, voices lifted in horror, in prayer, in rage. And I knew, even then, that none of it mattered.
It is a strange thing to watch a world die. Time itself seemed to distort in those final hours. The destruction was relentless, and yet there were moments of unbearable slowness. I recall standing amidst the ruins of my home, staring up at the distant arcs of light where the last remnants of our fleet tried, in futility, to flee. Their trails burned bright against the dark, their engines blazing like false stars—until they were snuffed out, one by one, by weapons unseen.
I did not try to run. There was nowhere left to go. I wandered through the shattered streets, past the ruins of temples and markets, past bodies I did not recognize and those I did. The air was thick with heat and silence, the kind of silence that follows only when the world itself has been torn open and left hollow.
Then, through the smoke and ruin, something strange occurred.
The light changed. The fire of the sky dimmed, not from the settling of ash, but as though something vast had drawn a curtain over the heavens. The very air seemed to hum, an eerie resonance vibrating through the wreckage. It was then that I saw the ships. Not the cruel and angular vessels of our Enemy, nor the broken wrecks of my own people, but great dark shapes that moved without sound, casting long shadows over the dying land.
I did not see them descend. I did not see doors open, nor figures emerge. I only remember the light shifting once more, and then the world was gone. The pain, the heat, the very ground beneath me—all of it vanished in an instant.
I remember weightlessness. A vast darkness that was not the void of the upper sky, nor the abyss of the sea, but something deeper, something endless.
And then, nothing.
I do not know how long I remained in that place, that absence of all things. When next I awoke, I was not upon my world. I was not beneath the burning sky, nor among the ruins of my people. I was somewhere else—somewhere cold, somewhere vast. And I was not alone.
There were others. My kind, though I did not recognize their faces. We stood together, dazed, silent, beneath a great metal vault that stretched high above us, gleaming with a light that had no source. Walls curved in ways that defied reason, smooth and seamless, untouched by time or tool. And in the air, unseen yet undeniable, was the presence of something beyond us.
I did not know them then. I did not know the hands that had taken us, nor the purpose they held. But in that moment, as I stood upon the threshold of a new existence, I understood one thing with absolute certainty.
We had not been saved. We had been claimed.
Chapter Two: Taken from the Ashes
The shock of awakening was enough to still the heart of any man, and I was no exception. The moment I opened my eyes, I was assaulted by a disorienting flood of sensations: the unfamiliar chill in the air, the cold gleam of metallic surfaces stretching out in all directions, and the sound—though muted—of machinery running smoothly beneath my feet. I had not expected to find myself in such a place, nor could I have imagined what awaited us once the veil of unconsciousness lifted.
The space around us was enormous. Far larger than any hangar or vault I had seen in the vast cities of my homeworld. The walls and ceilings seemed to curve into infinity, crafted from dark metal that absorbed all light, leaving the room bathed in an eerie half-light. It was clean—sterile, even—and the air had a strange quality to it, as if it were too pure, too thin. The silence was deafening. There was no hum of engines, no whisper of wind, no sound of life. It was the silence of a tomb. A tomb made of metal and shadow.
I had no concept of time in that place. I did not know if minutes or hours had passed since I had been taken, nor did I know where I was. But there were others around me, some stirring and others still as death. My people. Survivors of the war. I recognized the faces of my brothers and sisters, though they, too, were uncertain of what had transpired. We all shared the same look—bewilderment, fear, and above all, the hollow feeling of having lost everything.
One of us stirred first. His name was Jadran, a childhood friend, though I could scarcely recall the last time I had seen him alive. He looked as disoriented as I felt, his eyes wide and searching as he pushed himself up from the floor. He reached out, hands trembling, and gripped the metal walls around us as if expecting them to collapse at any moment. "Where are we?" His voice cracked, raw from disuse. "What happened?"
Another voice, this one from the far corner, joined in. "I don't know... this is... this isn't home." It was Darya, a woman from my village, her voice soft yet steady despite the fear in her eyes. She, too, stood shakily, taking in the surroundings with a confusion that mirrored my own.
And still, none of us spoke of the inevitable: what had happened to our world? What had happened to the firestorm, the endless bombardments that we had all witnessed in our final moments? I feared even the thought of it, but there was no time to mourn. There was no time for questions or regrets. We were here now. Somewhere far from the hell we had known.
At first, we attempted to communicate with each other, to piece together what little we could remember. But the walls, they seemed to stifle our efforts, closing in around us. The more we spoke, the less it seemed to matter. Our words sounded hollow, meaningless in this place that was neither of this world nor of any world we knew. The echoes of our voices bounced off the curved metal, swallowed by the silence.
Then, I felt it—a subtle shift in the air, a pressure like something unseen brushing against my skin. And with it, an overwhelming sense of being watched. I was not alone in this sterile space. We were not alone.
A soft hum, almost imperceptible, filled the chamber. A subtle vibration in the air that only grew stronger, deeper. It came from every direction at once, resonating in my very bones. We all felt it, and we all froze. There was no understanding of it, no words to explain it. But in that moment, we knew without a doubt that something else was here—something beyond us, something unseen.
The others reacted with a mix of confusion and unease, their eyes darting about, scanning the shadows. It was as if the walls themselves were alive. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the walls were not mere walls but the instruments of whatever force had brought us here. I had no answers.
And then we saw them.
I will never forget the first time I laid eyes upon them. It happened without warning. As we stood there, trembling, the walls before us parted, though we had seen no doors, no hinges, no movement at all. They simply opened, as though the very metal had dissolved in the presence of something far greater than our comprehension.
And through those darkened passages, they came.
The beings—if indeed they could be called beings—stepped into view. They were unlike anything I had ever seen in all my life, and they carried with them an aura of alien majesty that I still cannot describe in any manner that would do them justice.
They moved with an unnerving precision, their elongated forms neither stiff nor fluid, but poised with an effortless control that felt deliberate in a way no human movement ever could be. Their pink-bronze skin, smooth as polished stone, absorbed the dim light rather than reflecting it, giving them an almost sculpted appearance—too perfect, too seamless, as if nature had not shaped them but refined them. Their faces, symmetrical to an unnatural degree, held no visible ears, their large, green eyes betraying nothing. Their slit pupils, narrow and keen, did not flicker with emotion, yet their gaze carried a weight that pressed against my mind, making me feel observed in a way that was deeper than sight.
Most striking of all was the ridge that ran from the center of their brow to the crown of their skull—a vertical crest, subtle yet unmistakable, dividing their features as though it marked some unseen boundary. There was an undeniable sense that it meant something, that it was more than mere anatomy. It gave the impression of a division not only of flesh but of mind, as if the being before me was split between two aspects of itself, bound together in perfect balance.
They moved without sound, their footsteps absorbed into the very air, and they regarded us as one might regard an insect—something beneath notice, but not entirely without interest. Their large, green slit-pupiled eyes locked onto me, reflecting nothing. They did not blink, nor did their features shift in any discernible way, yet I could feel something behind their gaze—a quiet, precise calculation. It was not curiosity, nor was it cruelty, but something colder, something unknowable.
We stood frozen, not daring to speak, not knowing what we should do. Some of us—those who had once been leaders, commanders, those who had held positions of power in the old world—attempted to approach, to ask questions. But no words came. There was nothing but a suffocating silence, an oppressive atmosphere that held us in place like insects caught in a web.
Then, one of them spoke.
It was not a voice that I heard, not in any conventional sense. Rather, the words came to my mind, a flood of meaning that bypassed my ears and struck directly at my consciousness. The language they spoke was not one of sound, nor one of symbols. It was something far more complex, a language of thought. A language that I could not comprehend in its entirety, but a language that made one thing abundantly clear:
"You are not free."
The words were not spoken with malice, nor with sympathy. They were spoken with the certainty of a truth that was both terrifying and inevitable. And in that moment, I understood that we were not in a place of refuge. We were not in a sanctuary. We were captives.
And this—this vast, dark vessel—was our prison.
Chapter Three: Awakening in the Void
I remember the first time I dared to test the limits of my confinement. The ship—or whatever it was, for it defied all categorization—was a labyrinth of sterile, metallic corridors and chambers, its design unlike anything I had ever encountered in the cities of my world. The walls seemed to shift subtly, as if they were alive, or at least responsive to something beyond my understanding. The air was always cold, perpetually still, and the faint hum of the vessel’s unseen machinery never ceased.
When I first awoke, I had been unsure whether I was still dreaming or whether I had somehow crossed into a new reality entirely. The disorienting sensations of being suspended in stasis were still vivid in my mind, a memory that seemed to warp and twist with every passing hour. I could still feel the vague discomfort of being trapped in that strange sleep, where thoughts and time became one unbroken haze. But now, here in this chamber—this room, which was both too large and too small at once—I knew something had shifted.
My mind was sluggish at first. I could not seem to focus on anything other than the glaring truth that we were alive, yes, but we were not free. How many of us? How many survived the destruction of our world? These questions crowded my mind, but each time I tried to answer, the thoughts dissolved, like sand through my fingers.
I was not alone.
All around me, the faces of the survivors stared at the walls, as confused and lost as I was. Some spoke in hushed tones, but their words were meaningless—questions with no answers. Others sat silently, their eyes glazed with the same emptiness I had seen in their expressions the day we were first taken. What had become of us? Where were we? Was our world still burning, still falling into ruin?
I could not answer them. I could not even understand the depth of the silence that hung over us like a shadow. The ship—or prison, as I had begun to think of it—held us in place, like birds trapped in a net, unable to move freely, unable to speak without the thick air around us choking our words before they could escape.
For the first few days, I did not venture far from the chamber where I had awoken. Fear kept me rooted in place, as it did with the others. What could we do in a place like this? What could we possibly accomplish when every effort we made seemed futile?
But as the hours stretched into days, and the days stretched into weeks, something within me began to stir. A gnawing hunger for understanding. A need to break free of the strange prison we were in, to find some shred of purpose or meaning in this strange new world we now inhabited.
One day, driven by that insatiable hunger, I made my way deeper into the bowels of the vessel. The others—those who could still walk and think—watched me with wide, fearful eyes, as if they were unsure whether I was brave or foolish. But I did not care. What was fear to me now? I had already seen the end of my world. I had already seen my people crumble under the weight of war and destruction. What was left for me to fear?
The hallways stretched out endlessly, as if the ship itself had no boundaries. Each turn revealed more of the same: dark, curved walls, smooth as glass, glowing faintly under the cold, harsh light that hung from above. And always, that incessant hum, like the heartbeat of some great, monstrous creature lurking just beyond my reach.
I moved with purpose, though I had no clear destination. The walls of this place seemed to respond to my every step, as if they were aware of my presence, of my intentions. I would touch a panel at random, pressing it with the palm of my hand, and the wall would open before me, revealing another space within the vessel. But nothing was familiar. Nothing was comforting.
After what felt like an eternity of wandering, I found myself in a room that was not like the others. It was smaller, more confined, and the walls here were not smooth but instead covered in strange markings—symbols that I did not recognize. They glowed faintly, their edges sharp and angular, pulsing with a rhythm that seemed to match my own heartbeat.
At first, I could not make sense of them. The symbols appeared meaningless, a jumble of shapes that mocked my inability to understand. But as I stared at them longer, a strange sensation washed over me. It was as if something in my mind clicked—something deep inside, something buried beneath the surface of my thoughts.
I could almost understand them. They were not decorations. They were not random. They had a purpose.
I traced my fingers over the glowing symbols, trying to grasp something, anything, from them. At first, they were nothing more than strange shapes, their structure taunting my inability to comprehend. Yet, the longer I studied them, the more I felt something stir within me—not understanding, not yet, but recognition.
There was a pattern.
The symbols were not beyond my grasp. Somewhere in their arrangement, there was logic, an order waiting to be unraveled. The Architects—though I did not yet know to call them that—were beings beyond our knowledge, but that did not mean they were beyond comprehension.
A chill crawled over my skin and I turned my head sharply. I had the distinct feeling of being watched. Then, an image flashed through my mind. It was like a memory, but was not my own.
A vision of something vast, ancient—structures that defied scale, rising beneath skies that had never known the touch of a human world. I saw them, our captors, their slit-pupiled eyes gleaming, their forms motionless as they watched something unseen. They were observing. They were always observing.
I stumbled back from the wall, my breath unsteady. The vision had come without warning, without sound, without explanation. Had the symbols triggered something in me, or had I been noticed?
Then, as if in answer to my question, the ship spoke.
Not in a voice, not with sound—but with a presence. A force that filled the room, the space, and my very mind. I could feel it, cold and sterile, like a breath across the back of my neck.
"You are no longer what you were."
The words filled my mind, their meaning clear yet impossible to grasp. And before I could even respond, before I could react in any way, the sensation faded. The presence was gone, leaving behind only the oppressive silence once more.
I stumbled back to the chamber where the others waited, my mind whirling. What had just happened? What was it trying to tell me?
But I could not find the answers. Not yet. The truth seemed too far away, buried under layers of secrecy and mystery. All I knew was that we were no longer in control of our fate. We had been taken from our world, stripped of everything we knew, and now we were lost in a vast, unfathomable void.
I did not know who had taken us or for what purpose. I did not yet understand that the Architects had come for us, that they had stolen us from the ruin of our world. When they departed, they did so without sound, without explanation, and without a single glance back.
Chapter Four: The First Glimpses of the Architects
It had been days since I first encountered the strange symbols etched into the walls, and still, they haunted me—like fragments of a dream that linger long after waking. I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that I would find some explanation for the haunting images, some reason to justify the eerie presence I had felt within the ship. But nothing prepared me for what was to come next.
I had returned to the sterile room I shared with the other survivors, my mind full of questions and doubts. The cold, steady hum of the vessel enveloped us all like an impenetrable fog, and the walls, like silent sentinels, watched us with an alien patience. It was then that I saw them.
At first, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, perhaps another side effect of the long, disorienting stasis. But when the figures appeared—tall, thin, and utterly unlike any beings I had ever seen—my heart skipped a beat.
They emerged from the shadows of the corridor, their forms gliding effortlessly, without a sound. The light from the vessel's overhead fixtures caught their skin, which gleamed a soft, unnatural pink, like polished stone. Their faces were long and angular, as if sculpted by an alien hand, and their eyes—those eyes—were the most unsettling feature of all.
Slit-pupiled and green, they gleamed with an intelligence so sharp, it felt as if they could see directly into my soul. And atop their heads, running from the forehead down to the nape of the neck, was a strange fin-like ridge, bisecting their skulls in a way that seemed almost… unnatural. I could not fathom its purpose, but it was impossible to ignore.
I froze. My mind screamed for me to look away, to retreat into the shadows where I might be safe. But I did not move. I could not. My eyes were locked on their forms, unable to look away from the terrifying majesty of these beings.
They spoke, though their words made no sense to me. Their speech was harsh, like the scraping of metal against stone, and their vocalizations seemed alien—utterly beyond my comprehension. It was not just their words that bewildered me, but the rhythm and cadence of their voices, which seemed to echo in the air as though they were not speaking aloud at all. The language felt wrong, as though it existed in a frequency outside the bounds of what we, as humans, could truly understand.
They moved with purpose, their bodies fluid and precise, gliding effortlessly across the floor of the chamber without the slightest indication of effort. Their movements were both graceful and terrifying—like hunters, poised and ready to strike.
I watched in silence, every muscle in my body frozen with a mix of awe and fear. There was no sense of kindness in their gaze, no warmth in their approach. They regarded us as a biologist might regard an unfamiliar species—without malice, without sympathy, only a distant, detached observation. We were variables in an equation they had already solved, nothing more.
As I stood there, rooted to the spot, one of them approached. It was tall—taller than any human I had ever encountered—and its movements were hypnotic. I could feel its eyes on me, searching, analyzing, assessing. I could not help but flinch, as if the intensity of its gaze might pierce through the very fabric of my being.
It stopped just in front of me, and for a moment, all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. The being did not touch me, but I could feel the weight of its presence pressing down on me. And then, without warning, it reached up with a long, slender hand and extended one of its fingers toward me.
I recoiled instinctively, but the being was too quick. It grazed the tip of my skin, its touch cold, like the surface of metal. There was no warmth, no softness—only the sharp, alien chill of its finger. It held my gaze for a long moment, as if reading something I could not perceive.
And then it stepped back, its piercing eyes never leaving mine. Without a word, the creature turned away and joined its companions. Together, they moved to the center of the room, speaking in that harsh, incomprehensible tongue. They were discussing something—I could sense that much—but the meaning was lost on me.
In the midst of their conversation, one of the beings turned back toward me, and for a brief instant, I thought I saw something shift in its expression. A flicker, a moment of recognition, perhaps? But it was gone in an instant, swallowed up by the cold detachment that seemed to define them.
As quickly as they had appeared, they left. The door to the chamber slid open silently, and the strange beings glided away, disappearing into the vast, uncharted expanse of the ship.
I stood there, alone once more, my body trembling with the weight of what had just occurred. What were they? What did they want with us?
But most importantly—what had they seen in me?
I could not answer. The memory of their presence haunted me still, like a shadow that followed me even when the room was empty. The touch of their cold fingers, the gleam of their eyes—it was all too much to comprehend in the moment.
What were we to them? Were we simply another experiment, like the war-torn world they had plucked us from? Or were we something more—something they had planned for all along?
The questions swirled in my mind, but there were no answers, only the cold, indifferent hum of the ship and the silence of the void. I could not shake the feeling that we were being watched—always watched—by beings whose intentions were as inscrutable as the stars themselves.
And as I stood there, pondering the enormity of what I had just witnessed, I realized one thing with terrifying clarity: our fate was not our own. We were no longer masters of our destiny. We were prisoners. We were pawns in a game far greater than anything we had ever known.
The Architects had come, and we were nothing more than their playthings.
Chapter Five: The Seeded War
I had known war in the world we left behind. I had seen it in its most savage, unforgiving form—the kind of conflict where cities fell, people vanished in the blink of an eye, and the very land seemed to writhe in agony as it was torn apart by the forces of destruction. But what I had learned in the days that followed our capture, what the Architects revealed to me through observation and quiet, stolen knowledge, shattered everything I had believed about war, about fate, and even about the world we had lost.
It was not a random disaster. It was not the inevitable collapse of civilization that had brought our people to the brink of extinction. No. Our destruction had been orchestrated, cultivated, seeded long before the first bomb ever fell. Our planet, our home, had been nothing more than a garden—a garden cultivated with the blood and sweat of our species, nurtured for the sole purpose of a grand experiment.
The war that had consumed our world—our people’s war—was not an accident. It was a plan, designed and set into motion by the Architects. We were mere pawns in a game that none of us had ever understood.
In the hours and days after the encounter with the Architects, I began to piece together fragments of information. The ship’s data streams, though largely incomprehensible, held glimpses of the terrible truth. As I spent more time alone, I discovered hidden compartments, data caches buried deep within the vessel's systems. The more I accessed, the more I understood. The Architects had not only observed us—they had created the conditions for our war, manipulating the forces that shaped our world as easily as a gardener prunes a plant.
Our homeworld, with its sprawling cities, its vibrant cultures, had been carefully engineered to breed division, to foster conflict. They had seeded our planet with the promise of resources, with the allure of power, and had watched as we tore each other apart in a desperate scramble for dominance. Every nation, every ideology, every belief system—we had been set against each other, unwittingly pitted in a struggle that was far older than any of us had realized.
The Architects had done the same with our enemies—the species we had fought to extinction. I had known of them, of course, the others who had once inhabited the same world, their civilization thriving alongside our own. But what I hadn’t known—what I had never understood—was that our war had not been an act of necessity, nor had it been born of hatred. It was engineered. Both our species had been cultivated for this purpose. The Architects had planted the seeds of our destruction long before either side ever fired the first shot.
The enemy we had fought—those we had deemed our greatest threat—had been just as much a part of the experiment as we were. In their own way, they had been manipulated, driven by forces they could not control. The Architects had set us on a collision course, knowing full well that we would destroy one another. It had been inevitable, scripted, a drama that played out over generations.
And now, as I stood aboard the cold, metallic ship, surrounded by the remnants of my people, I could see the aftermath of that experiment laid bare. We were the last survivors, gathered together like cattle in a pen, awaiting whatever fate the Architects had in store for us.
But as I pondered the enormity of what had transpired, a gnawing question rose in my mind: Why? Why had they done this? What was the purpose behind it all?
The answer, I realized, was still just beyond my reach.
But I had glimpsed something more—the Architects’ true nature. They were not mere observers, detached from the consequences of their actions. No, they were active participants, manipulators, engineers of destruction. They had bred war, nurtured it, and watched as it consumed everything we had known. Their cold, indifferent gaze had seen our world burn, and they had done nothing to stop it. Perhaps they had not even cared.
The knowledge was maddening. We had been lied to, from the very beginning. The war had not been about resources, or ideology, or even survival. It had been a grand experiment, a twisted game of chess played across the stars. And we—both our species—had been nothing more than pieces on the board.
In the silence of the ship, with nothing but the hum of the engines to keep me company, I began to wonder if any of us had ever truly understood the nature of our own existence. Were we, too, a part of the Architects’ design? Were we nothing more than another experiment, another group of creatures to be observed, to be controlled?
The question lingered in my mind like an infection, spreading through my thoughts, tainting everything I had ever known. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the war we had fought, the extinction we had narrowly avoided—these were just the beginning. There was more to this, so much more.
And now, as the vessel carried us toward a new world, a world we could not yet understand, I could not shake the feeling that the Architects were watching us still. That our fate was not in our own hands, but in theirs. That the game was far from over.
It was then that I began to understand the true weight of what had happened. We had not just been destroyed. We had been tested, shaped, molded—seized from the ashes of our world to serve some greater purpose. The question now, as we traveled through the void toward the Enigma system, was what that purpose would be.
We were not merely survivors. We were the survivors of an experiment. And the Architects, those distant, cold beings, were the ones who had designed it all. What they wanted from us—what they intended to do with us—remained to be seen. But one thing was certain: our struggle had not ended. It had only just begun.
Chapter Six: The Others
For a long time, I believed we were the only ones.
The Architects had taken us from the ashes of our world, gathered us like artifacts, and placed us aboard their vast, silent vessel. Though their purpose remained unknowable, it had seemed, at least, that our fate was singular. We were the last remnants of a doomed species, adrift in the void, with no one left to remember the war that had destroyed us.
But I was wrong.
I had made a habit of observing the Architects, watching their silent movements, their unspoken interactions. They rarely acknowledged us, and when they did, it was with the detached precision of a scientist handling specimens—never curiosity, never cruelty, just the cold weight of analysis.
And so it was by watching them that I first learned the truth.
It began when I wandered too far into the corridors that we were not meant to enter, the ones that led away from the sections of the ship where the survivors were confined. There were no guards, no barriers beyond the silent scrutiny of the Architects, but something about these corridors always felt different.
That was when I saw it—one of them, two of them, moving together in the dim glow of a viewscreen embedded into the wall. I pressed myself into the shadows, watching, waiting.
The screen flickered with strange symbols, their alien script pulsing with an unreadable rhythm. And then the image shifted.
At first, I did not understand what I was looking at. It was another chamber, much like the one where I had first awakened, with smooth, seamless walls and a sterile, lifeless atmosphere. But within that chamber was something I had not expected to see.
They moved in the cold glow of the chamber, their figures small on the viewscreen, distant enough that the details blurred despite the screen’s unnatural clarity. I had always known what they were—had been told of their heavier forms, their thicker skin, the weight that shaped their every motion. But knowing was one thing. Seeing it was another. Their movements were slow, deliberate, not with hesitation, but with the sheer presence of bodies meant for a world unlike mine.
The dim light caught uneven textures across their skin—whether scars, markings, or something else, I could not tell. What struck me most was their stillness, the way they carried themselves—not defeated, not fearful, but aware. As though even here, even now, they understood the weight of being watched.
The Enemy.
I could not breathe.
They were alive.
Not just one or two, but dozens of them, gathered in that distant place, confined just as we were, held in another of the great vessels that drifted through the void. Their faces were unreadable, but I knew, with a certainty that burned in my chest, that they had fought as we had fought. That they had believed, as we had believed, that annihilation was the only outcome.
But the Architects had taken them, too.
The two Architects watching the screen made no indication that they knew I was there, but I did not dare to move. Their eyes, green and slit-pupiled, flickered with something I could not understand. A decision? A calculation?
And then, for the first time, I heard one of them speak.
A layered voice, cold and distant, without inflection or warmth.
"They will persist."
The other paused.
"For now."
The screen dimmed. The Architects moved away.
I remained there long after they had gone, staring at the place where the image had been, at the space where I had seen the Enemy—not as conquerors, not as the monsters we had painted them to be, but as prisoners, the same as us.
The war had ended, but we had not been its victors, nor had we been its victims.
We had been its subjects.
And whatever experiment had begun with our destruction was far from over.
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