The sky above Ilyra cracked open in fire.
Kael Draven ran through choking smoke, boots skidding on ash-slick rock as the mining colony behind him collapsed into screaming flame. The only home he had ever known was vanishing into crimson ruin—steel walls melting like wax, bodies strewn like scorched dolls, and the air thick with the stink of plasma and burnt bone.
The suns weren't supposed to rise for another two hours. But one of them had already bled across the atmosphere, sickly and wrong.
He didn't look back. Looking back meant stopping, and stopping meant dying.
"Kael!" someone shouted behind him—his name, raw with fear.
He stumbled over a shattered pipe and spun, heart hammering. It was Renna, his little sister in all but blood, her face streaked with soot and tears, dragging their dog-sized ration bot behind her like a useless sled. Kael grabbed her wrist and yanked her forward.
"Leave it!" he snapped.
"It has our food—!"
"We won't be alive to eat it!"
They bolted again.
Behind them, the colony's command tower exploded, sending a shockwave that knocked them to their knees. Kael shielded Renna's body with his own, ears ringing. Through the haze, silhouettes moved—black-armored invaders, not from any world Kael recognized. Their armor shimmered strangely, as if made of shifting crystal and smoke.
A hand seized his arm. He spun, ready to strike, until he saw the blood.
Master Orion.
His mentor, father-figure, teacher of starlore and survival. His robes were torn, face half-burned. He held something in his other hand—a shard of metal etched with an ancient sigil.
"You have to go," Orion gasped. "Take her. Run. They know who you are now."
"What?" Kael blinked, not understanding. "Who I—?"
Orion shoved the shard into Kael's hand, fingers trembling. "Your blood. It's waking. The suns—they've seen you. All seven."
Then Orion's eyes widened.
A spear of light tore through his chest from behind. He crumpled without a sound.
Kael didn't think. He grabbed Renna's hand and ran, again, faster than before. His lungs burned. The metal shard seared into his palm as if alive, whispering things he didn't want to hear.
Names. Moons. Flames. Thrones.
They reached the ridge beyond the colony just as the second sun crested the horizon—ice-blue and pulsing. Kael turned, one last time, and watched as Ilyra burned beneath twin suns.
He didn't cry. Not yet.
But when Renna collapsed beside him, sobbing into the dirt, he finally opened his palm.
The shard glowed like a living wound.
And carved into its edge, in a script no one on Ilyra had spoken for generations, was a single word:
Draven.
His real name.
His legacy.
His curse.
---
> Somewhere in the void between worlds, something ancient stirred. The eighth sun—long banished, long forgotten—flinched awake. And smiled.