The hours following the cataclysm were a void. Sineus sat in the absolute darkness of his quarters, the emergency lighting from the corridor casting a single, sharp line of red across the deck plates. He was conscious, but unresponsive. His world had been reduced to the small, polished surface of his desk, where the fragments of Ferapont Orlov’s Boyar’s seal lay scattered. The dark nephrite, once a solid, cold anchor of his authority, was now just a handful of broken stones. Each fracture was a testament to his failure. Each sharp edge was the memory of his mentor’s final, sacrificial act.
He did not move. The sounds of the crippled Stoikiy were distant, muffled reports of damage control teams and the groaning of stressed alloy. They were the sounds of a world he no longer commanded. His gaze remained fixed on the shattered seal, the symbol of a tradition he had spent his life defending. A tradition he had just learned was built upon a foundation of sand, a history of lies he himself had authored. The silence in the room was heavier than the hull of his dead ship. It was the weight of a truth he could no longer erase.
A flicker of motion. His hand, steady and precise, moved to the command console integrated into his desk. The screen came to life, its light a pale blue in the oppressive dark. His fingers moved with the practiced efficiency of a lifetime of command, but their purpose was no longer to issue orders. It was to excavate a grave. He bypassed his own security protocols, slicing through layers of command-level encryption with a series of silent, brutal commands. These were locks designed to keep men like him from knowing what he now desperately needed to understand. He was not seeking tactical data. He was seeking the foundational texts of his enemy. He was seeking the truth of the Screaming Darkness.
The data flooded the screen. It was not the clean, elegant Gzhel Weave of a healthy system. It was a cancerous sprawl of corrupted information, a map of cosmic entropy. He had found it: the forbidden archives, the deepest and most classified studies on the nature of mnemonic decay. He saw a flow chart, a ledger of oblivion. Every documented act of severance—every redaction by the Archive Mandate, every surgical cut by a S.I.N.E.U.S. field agent, every single one of his own personal erasures across a century of service—was an input. Each input was a glowing thread that flowed not into nothingness, but into a single, expanding void at the center of the diagram. A void labeled in stark, simple script: Screaming Darkness.
He was not fighting it. He was feeding it. His life’s work, his entire philosophy of preserving order through the clean amputation of memory, was a lie. He was the primary architect of the very chaos he sought to contain. On the edge of the console, a diagnostic Gzhel Weave pattern, a small, perfect symbol of Continuum order, flickered. A single thread of cobalt blue desaturated to a dead, permanent grey. The system did not correct it. The flaw remained, a quiet, damning testament to the broken logic of his universe.
With a cold, deliberate act of will, he forced himself to access the one memory he had kept locked away in his personal logs, a file sealed even from himself. His own perfect recording of the Verniy Fleet’s erasure. The scene played out on his screen, a hundred years old but as clear as the moment it happened. He saw the loyal faces of the crew on their bridge, their forms crisp in the moments before their unmaking. He heard their final, solemn oath of loyalty to the Continuum, an oath sworn to his own younger, colder face on their viewscreen. He watched that younger man, a man who believed in the hard calculus of sacrifice, give the command.
He had called it a necessary price for order. He now saw it for what it was: the birth of a monster. The act of creation for the Ashen Choir. The price he had paid was not just their lives, but the integrity of reality itself. His conviction, the bedrock of his existence, crumbled into dust. His hand, resting on the console, began to tremble. He closed his eyes, but the image of the loyal captain’s face, saluting him in the second before oblivion, was burned into the back of his mind.
He opened his eyes. His gaze fell upon the fragments of the Boyar’s seal on the desk. The symbol of a tradition he thought he was upholding. A tradition built on a lie he had told himself. With a sudden, sharp movement that was devoid of anger but full of a terrible finality, he swept his arm across the table. The pieces of dark nephrite skittered across the deck plates, their faint clicking sound swallowed by the shadows. He had rejected the symbol. He had rejected the philosophy. He had rejected the man he was.
The red emergency light from the corridor cast a long, distorted shadow from his empty chair. The only sound was the faint, rhythmic ticking of a cooling power conduit somewhere in the wall.
He had shattered his own truth and now there was nothing left to fight for.
