IN ORBIT OF SILENCE
Somewhere far beyond the reach of
stars, where even light forgets the way home, a structure drifts in silence.
Not drifting through space, but with it — not orbiting the gravity well of the
neutron star below, but holding place as though existence itself dared not tug
too hard at what was inside.
This was not a palace made by hands,
but by will. The kind of will that grows bitter in solitude.
Black stone. Curved towers, gold accenting
every edge. Windows that opened only to vacuum. And at the center of it all, a
hollow quiet that had no business being called peace.
In that place, Cassius stirred.
He did not sleep in the human sense.
He rested the way old, wounded gods might — by becoming still. Motionless not
out of laziness, but because to move was to remember. And remembering hurt.
The whisper came without warning. Not
sound. Not even thought. A vibration in the infinite, thin as a sigh in a
cathedral.
The cry of a child.
And with it, a pulse of energy —
faint, but ancient. The kind of power that doesn't echo through time so much as
warp it. The kind of power that wakes sleeping things, or worse, grieving ones.
Cassius rose slowly, robes rustling
like paper dragged across stone. He was tall — too tall — but his silhouette
folded inward, hunched beneath an unseen weight. His hood cast a deep shadow
over his face, obscuring all but the suggestion of bone beneath.
He did not speak at first. But his
fingers twitched. His neck turned. And something old began to twist inside him
like a cracked bell trying to ring.
Then the muttering began.
"Again.
It happens again.
Always the crying, always the light.
Always that… sound—"
His voice was cracked glass, dry and
hating. Not loud. Not even angry. Just… persistent. Like it had been rehearsed
across centuries.
"Star-born parasite.
Screaming into life like it's new.
Like it hasn't done this ten thousand
times before.
Like we haven't bled for it."
He walked the corridor in steps that
had never been measured. Not because no one had tried, but because the palace
shifted with him — the walls lengthened or shortened depending on what he
needed. Or maybe what he deserved.
Outside, the neutron star boiled in
silence. A sphere of collapsed light. It had no name, no orbiting planets, no
purpose but to burn. It spun rapidly — flickering violet and white — but the
palace defied its gravity, anchored instead by something older than force.
Something like bitterness.
Cassius's path brought him to a hall
etched in spiraling runes, glowing faint green. Not emerald, not neon — but the
sick kind of green. Like rot under skin. Like the moment before bile rises.
The muttering continued.
"They'll call him a savior.
A redeemer.
A prince of peace.
They'll fall on their knees and paint
him in light and dust and cradle songs.
But I see him.
I remember the fire.
The seal.
Her scream—"
He stopped.
For the first time in centuries, he smirked…
The chamber ahead pulsed with ancient
power. Pillars rose from void, not stone. They weren't carved — they had always
been there. They had waited. In the center: a raised dais, holding a focus
crystal the size of a man's heart. It pulsed green.
Cassius approached it like a mourner
approaching a grave he'd visited too many times.
"You shouldn't be here," he said to no
one.
"You shouldn't be anywhere. The cycle
should have broken. You should have stayed gone. He should have stayed gone."
The crystal shimmered as though in
response. Through its surface, images flickered — not fully formed, just
fragments: A newborn scream. A nurse running. A woman's eyes gone wide with
fear and fading. Hospitals cracking under the weight of bodies.
Cassius placed a single hand on the
crystal. Long fingers. Pale skin. The faint shimmer of bone beneath.
"He cries and the cosmos weeps," he
said softly.
"So I will make it weep for real."
For a moment, his voice caught. His
mouth moved, barely forming the word.
"Bela."
It wasn't a name he spoke often. But
it was hers.
He had loved her before the war,
before the seals, before the Star King stole her from everything — from him —
under the guise of protection. He loved her still, even now. Even knowing she
had never loved him back.
Cassius had lived with that truth for
cycles. Doomed to watch her remain asleep while her jailer was reborn again and
again. And again.
He couldn't kill the Star King — that
much was law. The rules of the cosmos forbid one Cosmic from destroying
another. But mortals? Mortals were fair game. Tools. Pieces. Pawns.
So he would make the world burn
itself.
He removed his hand from the focus
crystal and stretched his arms wide.
The room answered.
Energy gathered at his fingertips —
thin, whispering threads of green, spinning out from the focus like strands of
fate unwinding. They pulsed across the palace, arcing through circuits etched
in air, old as starlight.
"They'll die afraid," Cassius
muttered, almost gently.
"And that fear will shape them. Twist
them. The way fear always does.
They'll hate. They'll devour.
They'll hunt."
The green light thickened, trembled.
He raised both hands now, and the
palace shivered — walls pulsing, air cracking. The green energy poured outward
in an expanding ring — a pulse, not unlike a heartbeat.
It raced into the void. Faster than
light. Faster than thought.
Toward Earth, and everything else,
And on Earth…
A scream.
Not from Cassius. Not from the palace.
But from a newborn child.
From lungs fresh with air. From a life
that had never known silence.
Flare Nacht.
Born screaming into a world that would
end just for letting him exist.