Q?l?th?s
She remembered.
Being lined up and told to be silent.
The shape of those ships patrolling the streets, the announcements that all was well.
She could still feel the vibration through her footpads — low, constant, almost soothing.
The enforcement craft never hurried. They did not need to. Their passage was the announcement.
All is well.
Remain calm.
Compliance ensures victory.
We are winning.
She had believed it.
No, she needed to believe it back then.
She needed to believe in an empire so grand and powerful that its failure was unthinkable.
She remembered the smell most clearly now.
Ionized air after the grav-lifts adjusted for the ship’s passage. Ozone threaded with the faint metallic tang of activated barrier fields.
Air perfectly filtered through atmospheric regulators, the breath of a world that had never truly been.
Their planet had been engineered into magnificence. Grandeur was a statement.
?ax’V?l?th could never fall, V?ll’?ar?n was built to last, Xal’Va?ül would produce anything, Val’Xür’?n was the crown jewel of ’A-K?th’Xül.
It all felt empty now, walking in the service passages of City 29, places only the Had? were meant to thread.
The ship in the hangar was smaller than the parade vessels, but the silhouette was unmistakable.
The dorsal curve suggested authority. The ventral struts were heavy enough to brace against unrest. The spines tuned to impale and display those foolish enough to dissent.
She remembered standing in a civic hall, pressed between elders, watching through the transparent fa?ade as a craft like this descended into the transit exchange below, where people were protesting the famine.
Fast. Violently. It charged, caring little for any life that would be lost.
It was the moment the dream shattered into a nightmare.
Pure, bloody spectacle, like in the arenas where the Had? were made to fight beasts and each other.
She had admired it then. Oh yeah, she had admired the ones responsible for her kin, for the wisdom of the Haralith.
The precision of their craft.
The scale of their constructs.
The order they brought to the galaxy.
To her and her people's lives.
All had a place, and there was a place for everyone.
There was a simple, clear, and linear solution for everything.
Gods, yes, some species considered them that.
They didn’t deny.
But that was the clearest sign that for everything outside that design, the place was oblivion.
The annihilation war was the cleanest, simplest solution.
Even as she pondered, she reached the hangar; her body could do as much now.
She lifted her hand to the hull, the Haralith unfolding and skittering across her forearm, plates separating with precise mechanical grace.
The authentication attempt initiated. The sensation was no longer emotional.
Layered authority circuits. Redundant command hierarchies.
Obedience matrices awaited a valid root signature.
A system built by a species that expected to outlast the stars themselves, that never designed for when the authority would be vacant.
Haraliths established a valid interface and remembrance of the old ways.
Compatibility: partial. Civil servant recognized.
Authority: conditional.
Operational integrity: compromised.
A cascade of dormant subsystems stirred.
Power bled from reserves into primary buses. Ancient capacitors swallowed charge like a creature drawing its first breath after drowning. Along the dorsal ridge, faint lines ignited — old imperial colors, dimmed by time but unmistakable.
Blue-white. Gold at the edges.
The hangar responded.
Dust shivered from ceiling struts as dormant maintenance rails unlocked with grinding reluctance. The vessel’s ventral struts adjusted a fraction, redistributing weight after centuries of stillness.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Internal status reports flowed through her bond in brutal clarity:
Hull integrity: 71%.
Propulsion lattice: misaligned.
Gravitic stabilizers: offline.
Containment emitters: degraded.
Weapon matrices: non-responsive.
Mobility capacity: minimal without structural recalibration.
The entry hatch split along a seam that had been invisible moments before, lowering halfway before stuttering. Motors protested. One actuator failed to complete its cycle.
Error.
She did not flinch.
The Haralith compensated by routing around corrupted firmware blocks and isolating feedback loops.
Diagnostic overlays layered across her perception, superimposed over the physical hull.
This clarity exceeded anything the old symbiosis allowed.
They had built for eternity.
They had not accounted for abandonment.
The restoration was feasible, but the time required and resources would be significant.
Through the collective, she sensed Ethan’s attention sharpen, tactical vectors already adjusting to the idea of mobility regained.
Humans. They believed to know best; she understood that much.
Then reality somehow bent over backwards to accommodate their vision.
They wouldn’t have won the war otherwise.
By serving Ethan, she was starting to see how.
The vessel’s internal lighting stabilized into a low operational glow. Not full readiness. Not even close.
Standby.
Awaiting repair.
The Haralith retracted slightly as the functioning accessway to the ship opened fully.
-It is barely active- she said, her voice steady despite the diagnostic noise flooding her mind.- It will require maintenance. -
Her gaze was fixed on the slab containing several cameras that encased the human’s head.
For a brief moment, she shivered. She had the unpleasant feeling that the human was grinning.
Seventeen
Walls. Hard.
Can climb, can break down entirely up above.
They don’t have all the mass of the down below.
The small ones build them emptier, it seems.
They have weak bodies. Soft edges. Few have claws. Generally, poor teeth.
They hide behind walls.
They trap themselves when they once trapped her.
They believe they can stop her.
At best, it slows her down, since all her life was behind walls, trapped by walls.
Tunnels narrowed her shape. Forced her forward. Forced her thin.
Thin was inefficient, but thin survived.
Above, there’s more space, she can grow her forms.
She prefers wide spaces to grow.
Bigger means slower, but also stronger.
They can make steel fly.
She will mold her flesh to fly.
They can shoot heat from a distance.
She will evolve to spit acid.
The defenders repeat the patterns. Effectively, she can’t overrun them easily.
Time favors growth.
In the tunnels, non-organic bodies move like organics.
She can hurt them, but they do not bleed.
She can skewer them, yet they do not die.
They return and rise again.
She wants to keep them occupied.
Losses are acceptable; the non-organic are better pinned down.
If she manages to breach, all the better.
A prize of meat awaits behind their lines; she can smell it.
The non-organics are protecting them; it’s frustrating.
Goal remains: Feed.
Grow.
Leave.
The planet is wrong, made of metal. Sky can close.
Closed sky is unacceptable.
A wall so big and thick that she can’t currently break through.
But there are ways in if watched.
She is running out of old forms, but the newer ones are mature.
She will feast.
She will grow.
She will leave the place of metal and seek elsewhere a world that breathes.
Here's a new original narration inspired by the concept of dragons in space I hope you can give it a try and enjoy it too.
