The work was a quiet science, a form of delicate listening. Corian Severus kept the Vagrant at a safe distance, charting the edges of a Palimpsest Scar. The phenomenon was a wound in reality where a shattered, overwritten world bled through the new, a shimmering field of spatial distortion. On the main viewscreen, a ghostly overlay of impossible architecture flickered across the stable image of the void, a city of ghosts haunting the present. He was testing the Cracked Compass, the brass and dark wood device that was his life’s work, watching its needle find a delicate balance in the conceptual noise.
He took a sip of the warm, tasteless nutrient broth from a bulb on the console, a small, grounding ritual in the face of such profound unreality. The compass, his personal navigation tool, held steady, its sliver of captured light indicating a stable, if wounded, region of the Logos. The test was a success. The compass could read the faint echoes of a dead reality.
A sound cut through the low, steady hum of the ship’s life support. It was a clean, piercing tone from the comms system, a signal protocol reserved for open-channel distress calls between rogue Mapmakers.
The signal was already degrading, a voice tearing itself apart in static. — …day… Mapmaker vessel Wanderer… something is… it’s not… — The voice dissolved into a final, sharp burst of static, then silence.
The silence was more alarming than the call.
— Trace that signal, — Corian ordered, his voice calm and even. He moved to stand behind Elara Vance at the sensor station. She was his former student, now his partner in this heresy, her fierce idealism a necessary counterweight to his own weary pragmatism.
Her hands were already moving, a blur of practiced efficiency across the holographic interface. — Diverting 20% from the integrity field to long-range sensors. It’s a risk.
— Take it, — he said. The choice was made, the price a momentary vulnerability for a sliver of knowledge. The hum of the ship deepened as power was rerouted. On her screen, a cone of inquiry shot out toward the source of the dead call, a sector of space they had left behind two days ago.
The screen resolved an image, faint and distorted by distance. It was not a ship. It was a silhouette, a moving hole in the fabric of reality. It had the shape of a blade, a shard of absolute blackness that absorbed the light of the surrounding conceptual noise. It was a void that moved with predatory intelligence.
It was there for a fraction of a second. Then, with a speed that defied their understanding of motion, it was gone. It did not travel; it ceased to be in one location and began to be in another, leaving no trail, no wake, only a lingering wrongness in the sensor data.
— What was that? — Elara whispered, her hands frozen over the console. — No drive signature. No energy readings. It was just… not there anymore.
Before Corian could answer, a thought bloomed in his mind. It was not his own. It was cold, clean, and structured, a communication from the strange, silent passenger they carried in the ship’s core: the Codex Paradoxa. The captured, sentient entity, a living artifact of fused order and chaos, rarely offered its own counsel. Now, it delivered a single, unsolicited concept with the force of a physical chill.
The concept was simple and absolute.
It hunts belief.
The words, if they were words, echoed in the architecture of his consciousness. The psychic shock was a cold spike behind his eyes, the price of contact with the alien mind of the Codex. He understood instantly. The distress call. The Mapmaker. The new entity did not hunt ships or people. It hunted the one thing that allowed a Mapmaker to navigate the void: their focused, disciplined conviction. Their greatest strength was a beacon. Their tool was the bait.
On the console beside him, the Cracked Compass screamed. The device, which had been so steady moments before, reacted to the distant passage of the entity. Its needle, the sliver of captured light, spun into a wild, uncontrollable blur, faster and faster until it was just a smear of light. The brass casing emitted a high-pitched whine of pure protest, a sound of tortured physics. The dial registered a conceptual turbulence greater than 7000 rotations per minute, a disruption far beyond anything he had ever recorded.
The Mandate, with its fleets and its Censors, was a known quantity. They were the architects of a perfect cage, their motives as predictable as their tactics. They wanted to capture him, to break him, to make an example of his heresy. It was a war of ideas, fought with ships and laws.
This was different. This was not a Censor seeking to purge a heresy. This was a predator drawn to the very act of thought. The Mandate wanted to put him on trial. This new thing, this Abyssal Stalker born from the wound of the Glass Abyss, wanted to consume the part of him that made him human.
The whining of the compass slowly subsided as the distant disturbance passed. The needle wobbled, then settled, its light dimmer than before. The silence on the bridge was absolute. The only light was the faint, steady blue of the consoles.
He understood their minds were now a beacon.
