Episode 5.5 | The Everlight Protocol

The first funeral Hael had ever attended was that of his brother, Evrin. Shock had ripped through Aurora Noctis, chased by the feral, inconsolable cries of its citizens. All sources of light within the city were solemnly dimmed and given to the Gardens of Grief to honor the departure of his soul. In the last hopes that he might reach the Aethre. 

It was not uncommon for the people of Tenebris to embrace death, whether permanently or momentarily. They did, after all, live to be well over a century—occasionally older, if they were Ethereal Blessed. It was ample time for anyone to feel content with whatever life they had lived. Thus, the passing of a Tenebrae soul was not a cause for mourning. Because the Eternity Promise ensured they would all reunite again in the aftercycle of the Aethre. 

But that had not been the case with Hael’s brother. 

Evrin’s body had been in a mangled state, too badly damaged to commit to the Aethre for rebirth of any kind. When their father had carried the broken remains of their kin into the cathedral, had laid them on the table in front of the Lady of Eternal Night—as his mother screamed and his sister fell into a silence of prolonged despair—Hael sensed the finality of it then. There was no flow of flux within Evrin’s tissues. The spark of magic and life had faded to nothingness.  

Sometimes the consciousness of the departed lingered, burrowed itself in the cyberware and the magi-tech augmented in their flesh. But there wasn’t any hope of this with Evrin, who had been an Ethereal Blessed and had no need of such technology. He refused to be synthetically altered. He had lived as though life were a precious vessel that had to be filled to brim with all it had to offer.  

And then he died.  

His brother’s death was not only permanent, but it was also, by the natural laws of Tenebris, wrong. No one had died in such a way for hundreds of years. Departed, perhaps, but never deceased.  Never dead.  

But as Hael stared down at his brother’s corpse, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the world had ended out of sight, and this sliver of flesh splayed out on the table was all that remained of it. 

The radvault Hael now stood in had that feeling to it. A wrongness. A finality. The lingering stench of undeniable death and destruction rushed to greet him with chilled embrace. Remnants of memories confined to containers resembling scorched coffins. Artifact bodies frozen in time, no place to call their own anymore. No one to claim them, to remember them, to mourn them. Deceased. Dead. Abandoned to a tomb beyond the end of the world and buried within a shifting sea of radiation.  

At first, Hael was overwhelmed by the blinding currents of radiation in the radvault. They exploded like microscopic pulsars, colliding and distorting the cold air. It was akin to peering through a haze of heat, the seams of reality seeming to liquify and meld together. Sickly greens, morose purples, and nauseous oranges—all blurred, all swirling in blinding clouds that soaked everything they touched in blossoms of light. This made it difficult to discern the artifacts from the room itself. Even Hael’s existence seemed to bleed and blend in the vault, no longer a separate entity, but another living thread of light woven into the tapestry. 

Every cell in his body hummed in response to the free-floating radiation. 

You shouldn’t, Erde warned, catching a whisper of intent flitting across his mind. You’ve been repressing the flow of flux for so long already, taking more in– 

Whether I absorb it or not, the outcome remains the same, Hael reminded her, removing his cloak and peeling off his black gloves. The magi-tech fabric of his clothing was resistant to his starlight flux, but it would get in the way of channeling it. I will deal with the consequences when we return to Icariel. As I have always done. 

The thin armor of his Starflare sleeve took on an otherworldly glow. It washed the vault in a prism of pure white and stark shadows. Hael drank in the radiation, breathing it into his lungs, drawing it deep into his organs and bones. It spilled the core of his being, where it joined the flow of flux that burned with cold fury through him. The kaleidoscopic brightness of the irradiated vault fractured to wisps of vapor. 

Vulcraith is blaming the Duskra protests for delays in Array P20 maintenance, Erde informed him quietly. He announced a marriage alliance between his son and eldest daughter of the Ishu tribe to restore resource shipments. 

Marriage alliance? No, it was more akin to a political hostage situation, with the unruly Duskran tribes slowly crushed under the thumb of the Astral Veil Empire for refusing to funnel supplies to fix the array—an array that technically belonged to Duskra. Vulcraith and the Astral Veil often conveniently overlooked these details.  

Hael snorted. Oryn will not be pleased by that news—he bit down as if to sever the words from his mind. What did it matter to him if the Knight Scholar was pleased or not? Erde said nothing in response to the mental slip, but he felt a gentle brush of her consciousness. 

Shaking the lingering burn of his Starlight Flux from his mind, Hael shook his head and scanned the rows of shelves scattered throughout the vault. Containment E-048 was in a state of disarray. He moved deeper into the frozen chamber, opening every storage container he came across. Most were rusted and falling apart from exposure to the radiation.  

Ice crunched beneath his boots as he came to an abrupt halt, spying a row of artifacts in glass boxes on the shelves that spanned the back wall. As he approached, the artifacts hummed in response to the radiation coursing within him.  

Are any of these the Historia Nexus?  

Hael walked along the shelves, wiping the frost off the glass boxes and peering inside them. A diadem. A portable stellarium. An hourglass made of mossy gems and pure silver. Moonblades. Dozens of relics were on display along the back wall of the vault, many that Hael had never seen before, even during his life on Tenebris. 

None of these are the Historia Nexus. Erde made a sound of disappointment. We’re looking for a small device. It resembles a galaxy laid flat. Golden frame. Dark blue crystal. There are small nodes etched all over it. Heavier than it looks, but it can be held in the palm of your hand. 

A smear of pulsing red reflected off one of the glass boxes.  

Hael turned, eyes falling on a grouping of steel containers in a darkened corner behind him. There was no soft flutter to the burn of crimson in the dark. This source of radiation rippled silently, like blood blooming in cold water. An old artifact.  

With inhuman swiftness and deftness, he shifted the metal containers around until his hands found one of blackened metal and silver Flux Arcana sigils burned across its surface. It rested in the shadows, layers of ice trapping it to the floor. The smear of red ebbed and flowed inside the box like a gaseous cradle of a dying star. Crouching down, he rested his trembling hands on the cold metal lid. His starlight surged and shattered the sigils.  

Erde, scan the contents of this container for the Historia Nexus. Hael lifted the lid and froze, breath caught in his throat. 

A ragged, filthy tome had been carelessly thrown into the storage container. It was plunked pages first, as if thrown in as an afterthought. Its spine was threadbare, pages torn and bent. Its cover was worn, the once luxurious and earthy brown leather of it now frayed and charred. The gilding of its title had been badly eroded and was no longer legible, but Hael had held this tome in his own hands, had read its stories countless times, had fallen asleep with it tucked in his arms for safe keeping. He could find its crimson smudge of hazy radiation with his eyes closed. 

No signatures matching the Historia Nexus are present in this container. 

We have the tome. 

Barely, Erde observed through his eyes. It’s falling apart. 

Hael lifted the tome out of the storage container. This was the Poetic Edda that the people of the SS Moros brought with them. It was the oldest tome of Tenebris, and the only hint of the worlds they had left behind. He gently pried open its pages, pausing at the back where a list of names was scrawled in fading ink. There, he found his ancestor: Pasiphae Astraeus, the commander of the SS Moros. 

“I am truly sorry for this,” Hael whispered, tracing the name in solemn reverence and bowing his head for a few seconds. Then he slashed the base of the tome’s spine with a knuckle blade, separating the glue and tail band that held its pages together. He peeled back the leather, cutting along the hinge until it exposed a hollow space between the backboard and the meshing that protected the threads holding its pages together. There, nestled amongst the carnage, was a thin data shard no bigger than his pinky. 

It was the Everlight Fragment— a key as clear as crystal, with delicate veins of metal wires too small to see with the naked eye. Hael held it up to the light, relief flooding his veins and quieting the ache in his heart. 

That small thing will bring the Aethre back online? 

No, Erde, Hael slid the fragment onto the metal chain around his neck, securing both beneath his clothes. A pang of grief and longing resurfaced, but this time, it was intermingled with hope. The Everlight Fragment IS the Aethre. 

Hael closed the tome, his fingers tracing over its uneven pages and rough cover one last time. He opened the flap of the satchel at his waist and carefully slipped it inside. His gaze swept over the empty shelves, glass boxes, and metal storage containers. His entire world fit in this frigid prison of a vault, suspended in its ruination, and it made him sick to think this was all that was left. 

Life was fragile and fleeting, and no promises of eternity could escape that fact. And yet, Hael couldn’t turn away from it. He couldn’t shake the urge to protect the delicate nature of life any more than the acrid burn of grief that prickled at his eyes. The Historia Nexus is not here, Erde sighed. It might be in a different radvault, but we don’t have time to search them all. Steeltalon will be disappointed. 

We promised him we would search for it, not find it. Nothing more, nothing less.  

Another lead, another dead end. No one knew where the Historia Nexus was, or who had it last. Was it passed between the clans of Galene? Buried in a temple beneath the sand dunes of Duskra? Guarded in a museum in Sollustre? Or was it still on Tenebris, hidden in one of its secret underground archives? Then there was the possibility that it no longer existed at all. That Hael and the Dread Knights were chasing a ghost… 

The radvault was eerily quiet, except for a near inaudible murmuring of Vulcraith’s speech. Hael closed the lid to the metal storage container with a quiet snap. He traced his fingers over the sigils, letting his flux sink into each one until they glowered a soft green. With a weary sigh, Hael rose to his feet and turned, grabbing his cloak and gloves as he headed for the entrance of the radvault.  

But as he moved passed the shelves near the entrance, a shimmer brushed the edge of his vision—a shadow of dark purple that sparkled like a translucent veil of starlight. Hael stilled, eyes narrowing on the tendrils of voidlight flux arcana seeping from a slender metal gathering dust on one of the shelves.  

Is that an artifact from Icariel? It could be a trap, Hael. Don’t touch it! Erde scrapped at the back of his mind in warning.  

Yes, this glimmer of light should not be here, he thought to himself, heart hammering in his chest as he stepped towards it. There had been dozens of artifacts from Icariel in Tenebris when Aurora Noctis fell, but none that the Astral Veil Empire would have stored in this radvault. The radiation signature alone would have tipped them off. Why was it here? 

He ran a hand over the cloudy black glass of the box and its metal bound corners. Hundreds of delicate sigils wrapped around it in complicated knots, but Hael undid them slowly, the seals fading to charcoal lines until the lid hissed open on its own accord. 

Disbelief crashed into him. It cannot be.  

Inside, floating as if held by invisible hands, was the dowel of the Scythe of Callinor. His father’s scythe. The very scythe that had shattered moments before his father had died. Before the whole of Aurora Noctis had been swallowed by a wave of light that obliterated everything, including Hael, to nothingness. “This…it should not be here. It cannot be here.” 

Erde’s voice drifted back into his mind, caught between softness and dread. Maybe whoever—whatever—brought you back also restored the scythe? What about the Divine Lady? 

No, Hael shook his head. She was dead the moment she lost control of the city, and it killed those of us who remained by her side. We all died, Erde. Neither the Divine Lady of Eternal Night nor the Aethre could have restored me. It was offline when Aurora Noctis fell.  And it is even less likely it restored this scythe since it housed souls, not objects. 

Silence stretched between them for a long moment before Erde cautiously asked, What would be the purpose of fixing a broken scythe and leaving it here? Who else had the ability to build you a body and bring you back to life?  

Who indeed, Hael wondered. There were only a few beings in the universe who could wield such power— and they were all the Eldren Navigators. Departed. Dead. Disappeared. Only a handful had stayed behind whe the Incident of 7693 took place.  

But even if that had been possible… His thoughts snagged on the impossibility of it. The Aethre required Bioforge augmentations to upload someone’s essence to the aftercycle upon death. And like Evrin and Valeska, Hael had never been augmented for it. He hadn’t been old enough at the time to make that decision for himself. 

A chill crept down his spin as he reached out and wrapped his fingers around the cold, blue steel of the scythe’s dowel. The metal hummed beneath his warm grasp, glyphs gasping to life and ablaze with quiet electric fury. 

I hate riddles, Erde grumbled, pausing. What does it say? 

Hael barely had time to read the glyphs to her before the dowel suddenly grew too hot to hold. Flares of jagged molten light spilled from words etched into the metal, singing his hands and burning his eyes. It fell to the ground with a sharp clatter, tendrils of light spilling from it. Hael stumbled back, watching in shock as the glyphs spilled out of the scythe, weaving itself in the air in radiant patterns of dark purple and the golden flames of starlight. The threads of light stitched together until they resembled the ghostly form of a faceless figure. It was familiar to him, dressed in the darkest of shadows, a body of pure starlight that writhed beneath a hood.  

A disembodied whisper filled the room, as if the owner of the voice had leaned in and spoke directly into his ear. 

“What is given in darkness will return in light. Only in the end shall the beginning be known. In life, all is bound by the Eternal Cycle. In death, the essence remembers its song. Steel your sorrows, Ethereal One. Gifter of Stars. Guide of Holy Flame–Hael Caladorn Astraeus.” 

As quickly as it had come, the light winked out, leaving Hael alone in the darkened radvault. His pulse thundered in his ears as starlight rushed through his veins. Radiation poured out of him in ragged breaths, flooding the vault once more  in a claustrophobic rush of shifting colors. 

It was a sickening gut feeling. This entity—whatever, whoever they were—knew who he was. They knew he would break into Containment E-048 on this day, knew that he would understand the significance of the Scythe of Callinor.  

But why? Hael gazed down at the scythe dowel, unease threading through him, sharper than any blade that ever sliced his flesh. The sight of it raised goose bumps on his pale skin. 

Hael wrapped his cloak around him and pulled on his gloves before he retrieved the Scythe of Callinor. The spark of magic was gone, hollow and dead as his brother was on the table that day. He shoved it into the satchel with the tome as he headed to the entrance of the vault.  

Let us get the hell out of here, Erde.