The Krasnikov moved soundlessly through the abyss, a warship built for battle, now ferrying only a father and son in silence. Beyond the thick observation glass, Orion watched as their howorld grew larger, its atmosphere a swirl of blues and deep violets against the void. He should have felt relief returning ho, but his mind was elsewhere—fractured between the weight of his father's words and the unknown frontier that had been thrust upon him.
He wasn't just training for the academy anymore. That path had been stripped away before he'd even had a chance to walk it. Instead, he was being molded for sothing else—sothing beyond even the Apex candidates.
Orion sat alone in the observation deck, fingers tightening against the armrest. His body still humd with the energy of his recent training session, but the adrenaline had faded, replaced by sothing colder. Cassian hadn't said much since their last conversation on the shuttle.
There was nothing else to be said.
The Dysarchial Raptures.
The na felt like an on.
He had never heard of them before, never ca across them in any of the texts available to him. How could sothing so important—so integral to humanity's greatest gains and losses—be hidden from an heir of an archon family?
The answer was clear. The Confederacy either stood to lose too much profit from public access—or the Raptures were still relatively new phenona, and they were racing to solidify their control over them before another power could stake its claim.
Orion wasn't naive enough to think that the Confederacy's secrecy was purely for humanity's safety. No, there was always an underlying calculus. If the Raptures had been responsible for their greatest technological leaps, then monopolizing them wasn't just about containnt—it was about power. Whoever controlled the Raptures controlled the future.
But there was sothing more unsettling about it. If the Confederacy's hold on the Raptures was still being cented, then that ant much about them remained unknown. The fact that even an heir like himself had never heard of them suggested the level of control being exerted over information flow. How much had been deliberately erased? How much did they still not understand themselves?
The implications gnawed at him. If humanity had already benefited from discoveries within the Raptures—the Genesis Strain, breakthroughs in physics and warfare—then what horrors had remained buried, too dangerous to be revealed?
Orion exhaled slowly. It was a rare mont of stillness, but his mind refused to rest. His father's warship continued its approach, the howorld looming ever closer. Soon, they would land. Soon, he would step off this ship and be expected to fall back into normalcy.
As if anything about his life had ever been normal.
A soft pulse from the interface on his wristcom alerted him to the change. The device, seamlessly integrated into his combat training gear, acted as both an identification key and a device for communication.
As he lifted his wrist, holographic data stread to life above his palm, cascading through a list of newly unlocked files. The security clearance had been rewritten at the highest level Cassian could authorize for him, which was level four clearance.
His terminal now glowed with classified data streams.
The first docunt was a list of missing teams. Expeditions that had ventured into the Raptures and never returned. The logs were clinical in their assessnts—dates, coordinates, the nas of crew mbers.
However, several data points were either missing or restricted at his level, preventing any clear understanding of what had truly gone wrong.
What gnawed in his mind was not the missing data nor the greyed-out ones, but one sentence:
STATUS: LOST
Orion scrolled further. Mission reports.
The details weren't much better. So expeditions had returned, but what ca back wasn't whole.
Report #2175-A: Subject exhibited signs of extre cognitive deterioration.
Report #4362-C: Psychological evaluations reveal fractured mories. Each crew mber insists they completed different objectives. No two testimonies align.
Report #5958-X: Final transmission received 14 days after presud disappearance. Crew had been declared lost a month prior. ssage contained incoherent speech.
Orion swallowed, a weight settling in his chest. This was what he was training for.
His fingers hovered over the next file—a corrupted video feed.
The playback stuttered, flickering between fras. Shadows danced on the screen, humanoid figures moving through a fog-laden corridor. The tistamp suggested this footage was from one of the earliest known Rapture incursions.
For a brief mont, the screen stabilized.
A voice, distant and distorted, ca through the transmission.
"It's not... It's... not ti. It's—"
A flicker. The cara jerked. Then—static.
The footage cut out. The tistamp kept running. Orion's hands clenched.
He forced himself to move past the feed. One final file remained.
Survivor testimony.
He read the words slowly, thodically. But the aning burned itself into his mind.
"I know my wife's face. I rember our wedding. But when I ca back... she was wrong. Her smile, the way she spoke—it was all wrong. My son doesn't exist. They say I never had one. I rember him laughing. I rember his na. But the world doesn't."
Orion exhaled sharply, his pulse a steady drum in his ears.
For all the talk of scientific advancents, for all the progress that had co from exploring these phenona, the cost was insurmountable.
The Dysarchial Raptures were not just dangerous.
By the ti Orion stepped onto the landing platform, the weight of what he had just read still clung to him. His fingers twitched at his side before he forced them to still—a brief, involuntary response to the thoughts still unraveling in his mind.
The sense of unease refused to fade. The air was crisp, the faint hum of distant transports filling the space between towering spires. This was ho. The sa sky, the sa streets. And yet, it felt... different.
Orion walked down the ramp, his posture composed despite the storm inside his head. Cassian followed a step behind, silent as ever.
At the base of the platform, a woman waited.
Valeria Zey'ran Reyes. His mother. The mont Orion stepped off the ramp, she was there, striding forward without hesitation. Her eyes flickered between him and Cassian, sharp as ever, but when they t Orion's, the scrutiny softened—just slightly. Then, in an unexpected gesture, she reached for him. A gloved hand against his cheek, the warmth barely dulled by the fabric.
"Welco ho, Orion." she murmured, almost to herself, before drawing him into a brief but firm embrace. The scent of star jasmine lingered.
Orion stood still for half a breath before he let himself return the gesture, just barely. It was fleeting, but enough. When she pulled back, her hands rested briefly on his shoulders before she studied him again, this ti with sothing closer to concern than re analysis.
Orion exhaled, giving a small nod. He knew better than to think she hadn't already been inford of everything. Cassian never kept her in the dark. But for now, she didn't press.
Instead, she glanced at Cassian. "The preparations are underway."
Orion barely registered the words until his gaze flickered to a nearby data slate resting in the hands of an attendant.
The guest list. He caught a na before the servant turned away—Elias Virellian. A familiar na, a potential rival. His presence at the celebration ant only one thing: this wasn't just about family—it was about politics.
It took Orion a mont to rember. His birthday.
Nineteen days.
Talk of guests, alliances, expectations.
It felt impossibly distant now.
As they entered the estate, the hum of conversation and movent surrounded them—servants coordinating arrangents, hushed discussions of the guest list, the inevitable political implications of the event.
Orion barely heard any of it.
His mind was still in the archives. Still trapped in the past, in the flickering light of corrupted data logs, watching phantoms of people who had ventured into the unknown and returned as sothing... else.
Still reading the words of a man who no longer recognized his own family, whose reality had fractured beyond repair.
His birthday was approaching. A grand celebration awaited.
But all Orion could think about was the mont he would step into the unknown.
The mont he would walk into the Raptures—and wonder if he would co back the sa.
Would his mind fracture like the others? Would he return to a world that no longer fit him, a reality that had shifted imperceptibly in his absence?
Would he even return at all?
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