(Six months ago)

The storms of Paldor sang to her.

They burned across the sky of the gas giant below, rolling tides of color and light, their thunder carried through the vacuum as a whisper against the platform’s outer hull. To the Secundi, these tempests were not chaos, but rhythm. The living heart of their home system.

From the panoramic observation tier of Refinery Eight, Seren Athell watched the clouds churn miles below, the lightning forks dancing in the cyclones. To her people, the storms were poetry in motion, an endless ballet of pressure fronts and life-giving elements. Every Secundi youth, even as young as zephyrlings, learned to read the weather patterns before they even studied algebra. The elders said the storms were our first teachers.

As Athell stood beneath the faint buzz of the power grid, she could sense that this song, the eternal chant of her people, was shifting.

“Flux variance is rising again,” reported Jirath, her deputy. His elongated fingers moved across the holo-slate, light reflecting off his pale skin. “Not from the atmosphere… The disturbance is coming from beyond orbital reach.”

Athell turned, her translucent robe flowing with the motion. “A malfunction in the array?”

“No, First Overseer. The interference is not local. It’s… external.” He hesitated, then lifted up the display. A storm of shifting ideographs pulsed around a map of the system. “Subspace harmonics are decaying. The Shroud… its… fading.”

For a moment, Athell could only listen, not to Jirath’s words, but to the silence that followed. The Shroud. The ever-present barrier that had defined their existence since before recorded history. Its dense subspace interference had made interstellar travel limited, sealing Paldor and all her neighbors, into quiet isolation.

Centuries ago, the greatest minds of the Astral Directorate sent a vessel on a ten-year journey to determine the Shroud’s reach. They returned with tales of aggressive alien cultures, with ships that could travel at inconceivable speeds. Cultures at war with everyone around them. Demons that would take the life of another for their own gain. They returned with proof that the Great Gods placed the Secundi here to keep them safe. They mined Paldor’s great bounty and traded with nearby systems in peace.

Now the Shroud, their protector, was falling.

She moved to the viewport again. Outside, the colors of the storm seemed brighter, more raw, as if the planet’s soul had been unbound. The light bled through the atmosphere in brilliant hues, reds shimmered into gold, humming gently against the thick plazglass.

“The pressure bands are stabilizing,” Jirath murmured, scanning new telemetry. “But external readings are confusing. Space itself seems… thinner.”

Athell lowered her gaze back to the storms below. “And thinner barriers invite intrusion.”

He hesitated. All Secundi knew the tales of the demons from outside the Shroud. “You believe they will come?”

She didn’t answer immediately. The storms flashed again, and for a fleeting instant, their reflections merged, pale and angular figures framed in golden light, two engineers facing the end of an age.

“They will come,” she said at last. “No barrier endures forever. Perhaps the Great Gods want us tested.”