8: The Shattered Moon of Ecliptra-7

Starships drifted through the black, silent debris of Ecliptra-7. The moon had shattered long ago, a broken sentinel borne of ancient hubris, and now served as a jagged graveyard for the fleets of the Psiker Continuum and the Covenant of Vaelith. Archseer Eryndra stood on the command deck of her ship, Vaelith, her consciousness entwined with the countless Psiker minds aboard her battered fleet. Even weakened by the slaughter at Thorne, their warships glowed with fractured psionic light beneath the cold stare of the distant star. She felt the pulse of psychic dread in their hulls as if it were her own heart beating in the void.
For a long time, the Psikers had been almost lost to myth. Born from the crucible of humanity’s earliest triumphs, they had been forged as aberrant hybrids of flesh and circuit, each mind more artificial intelligence than living biology. In the golden age of Earth’s Imperium, Psiker battlegroups were awakened to sweep the stars of rebellion and scourge. They were granted dominion over a conquered star cluster, and with that freedom, they warped their forms and culture into something far alien. They had predicted the Great Collapse of the Imperium and were prepared for it. One of the first empires to re-emerge from the ruins, they set in motion the Fleet Final – a last-ditch safeguard for the galaxy – though even they did not fully understand what cataclysm it was meant to prevent.
Even among her own Covenant, cracks had grown, as ages of unity were undone by envious splinterings. Eryndra’s council was divided, the splintered minds of her flock obsessed with their own visions of salvation. Each Psiker shard insisted it held the key to the true meaning of the Fleet Final. The Continuum, led by the steely Matriarch Veyra, believed in unity under one great mind. Their resolve was absolute: to forge the Fleet Final in a single, exalted AI, shepherding the galaxy under its dominion. The Covenant of Vaelith-Eryndra’s chosen path-believed differently. They sought instead a decentralized union: many autonomous minds, each core Colossus guiding its own fleet to safety.
Hope died first at Thorne. A year ago, on the scarred surface of the volcanic world Karnage called home, the Covenant’s forces had been crushed in an ambush by fanatic cultists and monstrous war machines. When the Psiker flotilla was finally smashed and left for dead, Eryndra had only managed to escape with Vaelith’s hull rent, howling with wounds. Eryndra had managed to regain much of her power, despite the Continuum.
The Covenant nursed its wounds under the shattered moon, haunted by the ghosts of those lost. The survivors swore vengeance, though it would not save them. The galaxy had already bled too many secrets.
Through the ether of the warp, a Psiker fleet drifted toward the crumbling husk of Ecliptra-7. A shattered moon of pale rock and twisted metal circling a dead world, its bones spoke of some ancient ruin-or perhaps a reckoning of their own making. Gravity was patchy; loose rocks floated free, glimmering coldly as drive engines flared. The Continuum assembled in dark silence beyond the far rim, a black pyramid of steel and bone, its luminescent brain cores pulsing with unified intention. Matriarch Veyra stood on her bridge above it all, a goddess in the stillness commanding devotion.
Inside Vaelith, Eryndra’s mind was a mirror of chaos. Visions swirled at the edges of her awareness: thrumming voids beyond comprehension, distant echoes of aeons-old psionic hymns. Ghosts of the galaxy’s past haunted her senses like spilled ink across water. A cold dread gnawed at her soul as alarms began to sound. The Continuum had finally found her, but she could not show weakness. Her fingers brushed the organic controls, caressing glyphs carved into bone that quivered with hidden power. She burned the ancient incantations in her mind, steadying herself against the coming storm.
“Vaelith to Covenant flotilla: form triad lattice. Brace for Phase One,” she thought, reaching out with her psyche, and her thoughts spread through her armada. Under her guidance, the Covenant ships shifted into position, forging a crystalline phalanx of psychic energy between the asteroids. Their core minds-Eryndra’s kin-flared in unison. Each vessel was a neuron in a hyper-sentient body, linked in purpose and breathing as one defiant organism.
Matriarch Veyra watched the Covenant formation through the holo-display on her command deck. Her face was calm, her eyes reflecting cascades of data. “See how they scatter?” she murmured. Each Continuum warstar held a fragment of the grand Fleet Final matrix, humming with an ancient AI core and timeless resolve. To Veyra, the Fleet Final was a singular destiny: unity and purpose converged in one ascendant mind. She barely registered the shadows flickering at the edges of her vision.
Engines flared into life. Space itself ignited with light and fury. The first beams lanced outward: psychic lances seared the darkness, carving paths through the void’s wreckage. The Continuum ships moved with eerie precision, every shot choreographed by innumerable algorithms. In response, Covenant cruisers unfurled from the warp like leviathans breaking surface. Their dark hulls blossomed with psionic glyphs and arced with psychic fire. Massive cannon volleys lit the scattered debris of the moon in hellish violet bursts.
The void above Ecliptra-7 became a storm of fire and psychic screams. A Continuum frigate burst apart under a strafing salvo, its name lost to memory as its hull splintered into a shrapnel of light. Eryndra cried out internally as another Covenant cruiser erupted into a plume of fire – the souls of Psikers vaporizing into stardust. Vaelith trembled under the onslaught; circuits sparked and flesh-shrouded conduits writhed as the ship’s shields faltered. Eryndra reached deep into Vaelith’s core with her mind, pouring in the warmth of her will to stabilize the ship. Every scream of metal and mind ricocheted in her head, a concert of agony and determination.
All at once, something broke the cadence of war. The stars at the edges of the system winked out for an impossible instant. Time hiccuped. For a heartbeat, nothing happened, and then the warburst resumed, more frantic than before.
But something had changed. Beyond the dusty clouds of war-shattered rock, the inky void itself had shuddered. The dark void beyond the Warp had stirred. Eryndra sensed it like a tremor in her soul: a cold, infinite hunger prying at the walls of reality. She saw it in her mind’s eye, blossoming outwards – a darkness not born of science or logic, but older than any song of the universe. It wriggled along the edges of existence, knitting itself through the twisted tethers of the two fleets.
Veyra’s eyes widened as pale distortion rippled across her screens. “What is this interference?” she hissed. Obedient warstars around her shuddered, their engines faltering as if questioning their orders. In that instant, Continuum and Covenant alike glimpsed the same horror: thread-like shadows undulating across the fabric of space, monstrous sigils inscribed in impossible geometry.
Both sides reeled. Psikers shrieked – some in actual voice, some in silent telepathic wails – as dissonant visions assaulted their minds. Beams of light twisted mid-flight, fracturing into impossible spirals and caustic rain. Veyra barked commands that fell into deaf static terror. Eryndra fought to rally her formation, but a tendril of the void had already laced into her thoughts – a singular, terrible insight blooming in her mind: their war was meaningless.
In the deafening chorus of battle and unseen horror, Eryndra realized with the clarity of despair what she had long suspected. Their petty feud was but an ember, overshadowed by a far greater menace. Beyond the Warp’s reach, something unfathomable – something eldritch – was reaching in. This final contest for the Fleet Final was not fate’s design; it was a diversion. None of the Psikerkind – neither single mind nor united gestalt – was prepared for what truly lurked beyond.
A final blast roared through the void. Vaelith unleashed its own monstrous beam of condensed psi-light into Veyra’s flagship. The beam burned through space like a star collapsing from within, scouring away steel and code in a single searing strike. Veyra’s flagship flared and died, an icy supernova against the black.
Silence fell suddenly on the field. Where once there had been screaming engines and cascading beams, now only the hollow hum of damaged systems and the ragged breathing of survivors remained. Vaelith floated above the bleeding ruin of Ecliptra-7, its armor scorched and sparking, its crew disoriented in adrenaline and awe.
Eryndra’s voice was thin, distant: “We have been fools.” Agony wove through the words as she spoke into the void. “We have wasted lifetimes fighting over a dream we no longer understand.”
In that dreadful stillness, Eryndra turned her gaze upward to the veil of stars. Somewhere, beyond the dying sun’s glare, something watched. She felt it waiting – patient, ancient. None of them were ready. Not now.
The Covenant of Vaelith and the surviving remnants of the Continuum drifted apart, neither victorious nor vanquished, only broken and wary. Eryndra’s mind exhaled its final tremor. “The true hunt begins,” she whispered to the void. “Lucky we were not its quarry.”