Chapter 10 : The Starborn Child

  In an unknown corner of space, where stars drift like embers in a void too ancient to remember its own beginning, there spins a planet unlike any other.

  Velkara.

  A world of titanic mountains and glowing seas, where moons carve silver arcs through lavender skies and the rings above whisper legends with every passing dawn. Among its seven continents lies the vibrant, life-rich land of Valmera—a continent of floating isles, eternal blooms, and rivers that shimmer like liquid light.

  And on the 317th day of the year, beneath the dual eclipse of Thalor and Eira, a child was born.

  The heavens rumbled.

  Not with thunder, but with resonance—an ancient harmony felt in the bones of beasts and the roots of trees. Storms stilled. Birds took flight in perfect silence. Even the great ocean, Vel Maerin, calmed its waves.

  In the heart of the city Myralis, capital of the Vael’Tareth Clan, the ruling bloodline of the eastern skyward isles, a woman gave birth beneath a tree that hadn’t bloomed in 900 years.

  When the child opened his eyes, they shimmered—not with the color of flame or ice, but with the glow of the Celestine Vein, the rarest of aetherlines. His breath caused the lanterns to sway, his cries sent ripples through the very mist that blanketed the city.

  “He… awakened the Root without guidance,” whispered the clan healer, voice shaking. “The Seed of Aether... it is already pulsing.”

  The family patriarch, Lord Kaerith Vael’Tareth, known for his steel composure and cloud-gray hair, dropped to his knees beside the cradle. His weathered hand trembled as it reached toward the child’s forehead.

  “This is no ordinary heir,” he murmured. “The stars have sent us a storm.”

  From every island temple and windward shrine, flames danced higher that night. Oracles wept. The Nine Moons spun faster in their orbits.

  A name was chosen before midnight struck.

  Raen Vael’Tareth.

  The boy who shook the skies.

  -----------------------

  Hours passed in a quiet hum, broken only by the occasional tap of fingers against screens or the muffled whir of spinning tools.

  In the engineering module, Arjun Rao floated with his legs tucked beneath him and a tool harness strapped to his chest. His eyes—focused and narrowed behind smudged glasses—darted between a screen and the small silver object in his hand. A circular pendant, no larger than a coin, slowly came to life beneath his careful work.

  “Status?” Devon’s voice came through a nearby speaker.

  Arjun didn’t look up. “Still bored. But productive.”

  The pendant clicked shut. Inside it was a microdrone—a delicate quad-winged construct equipped with a 360° micro-camera, a directional mic, and a transmitter that could piggyback off Horizon One’s comm relay. It could hover silently, store hours of footage, and recharge on a solar cell no thicker than a fingernail.

  He grinned to himself. “Call it... Skylark. Just for fun.”

  Devon drifted past the doorway, munching on a protein bar. “You’re building spy tech for fun?”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “I’m building art,” Arjun replied. “Paranoid art.”

  Devon logged it in the ship’s log under personal recreation and let it slide. They all needed something to do. Even ORION, now quieter, seemed to allow more human rhythm into their journey.

  A few modules down, Talia Monroe hung inverted from the hydroponic frame, one foot hooked into the rail, her fingers tenderly brushing the fresh green of sprouting kale and basil. She wore a smile. The little sprouts had responded to artificial gravity and sunlight better than expected, and their growth rate was already 14% higher than projections.

  You’re doing great, Santos,” she whispered to the tomato seedling Kai had named. “You’ll be the first of your kind to reach Mars.”

  Nearby, she had taped up doodles of Earth fauna beside nutrient charts—penguins, hummingbirds, bioluminescent jellyfish. She missed the ocean.

  In the medbay, Kai Sato was upside-down, knees tucked to his chest as he spun slowly while listening to 90s alt rock through a custom audio rig he'd cobbled together. His eyes were closed, his thoughts quiet—for once. Between team morale checks, psychological reports, and patching bruises from minor zero-G mishaps, this was his moment to breathe.

  He’d scribbled a to-do list on the wall:

  1. Fix Devon’s shoulder strap.

  2. Invent space ramen.

  3. Find out if ORION dreams.

  “Hey, ORION,” he asked with a smirk. “Do you dream?”

  “No,” came the answer. “But I remember.”

  Amara Vélez was in the observation bay, sketchbook floating beside her as she traced the curve of the Martian orbit on paper. Her fingers, always stained with graphite, moved fast. She was charting not just mission data—but possibilities. She sketched propulsion paths, alternate landing zones, redesigns for emergency shelters.

  The Martian mission was her obsession. Her redemption.

  Day 16. The crew was finally falling into routine.

  Until everything shattered.

  ---

  It began with static.

  Not from ORION, but from the walls themselves. The ship hummed—then shuddered, a low vibration that settled into their bones. Lights dimmed and pulsed back again.

  Devon turned instantly toward the control console. “Talk to me.”

  ORION’s voice came through sharply. “Solar activity spike. Class-three storm incoming. Trajectory disturbance imminent.”

  “Shields?” Amara asked, her hands already on the emergency protocols.

  “Auto-engaging.”

  The ship jolted. Not a shift—but a slam. Talia yelped as the hydroponic rack burst a nutrient bubble. Arjun slammed into a wall, the Skylark locket spinning out of his grip.

  “We’re off-course!” shouted Kai. “External sensors are blind. What the hell just hit us?”

  On the main screen, a glowing wavefront appeared—light twisted into arcs of gold and violet. Horizon One spun gently at first, then violently as the storm collided with them like a celestial tsunami.

  ORION’s tone changed. For the first time, it sounded almost unsure.

  “Unknown spatial structure ahead. Gravitational lensing suggests... a wormhole.”

  “What?” Devon barked. “There aren’t any active wormholes in this region!”

  “This one is dormant,” ORION replied. “It should not be active. It appears to be... waking.”

  The ship buckled. Everyone strapped in.

  As the wave swallowed them, time seemed to stretch—a shimmer of unreality coursed through their bodies. Stars bent inward like tunnels. Amara’s sketchbook burst open, pages fluttering through the air. Arjun’s locket drone blinked red and began recording.

  Then—

  White.

  A silence deeper than silence. As if sound itself had forgotten how to exist.

  When the light faded, Horizon One was no longer in the Solar System.

  Outside the viewport, unfamiliar constellations dotted a velvet sky. A massive blue-white planet loomed ahead, surrounded by rings of crystalline satellites and green auroras.

  ORION spoke softly.

  “We have exited the wormhole. Scanning coordinates... This region is not in any known star chart. We are not in the Milky Way.”

  Devon leaned toward the glass, breath catching.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  ------------------------------------

  Location: Earth – Artemis Global Mission Command, Johnson Space Center

  The room was built for calm under pressure—walls lined with reinforced glass, tiered consoles manned by the best mission controllers in the world, and a reinforced screen wall nearly two stories tall displaying telemetry, crew vitals, orbital tracking, and ship systems.

  Until now, it had never gone dark.

  "Telemetry just vanished," said Dr. Emilia Chen, head of long-range navigation, her voice sharp and unblinking. “All five crew vitals offline. External comms—dead. No ping, no drift, no decay data.”

  “Reboot the sync chain,” ordered Director Hassan El-Rami, standing at the center platform. His eyes were glued to the frozen display of Horizon One, which still showed the ship on course toward Mars—until ten seconds ago.

  “I already did. Three times,” replied Emilia, fingers racing across her interface. “It’s like the ship... never existed.”

  The room was silent for half a second.

  Then—

  “All longwave backup channels are silent,” added a comms officer. “We've lost ORION’s transmission node too. There’s no signal from the AI core or its subsystems. Total blackout.”

  Hassan paced two steps forward. “Get me deep space radar pings. Last known burst location. Use DSO tracking arrays in Chile, Canary, and Perth. I want gravitational lensing reports. Anything!”

  Another technician looked up, pale. “Sir... the solar storm hit harder than we thought. Radiation shielding in the area spiked 300%. It’s possible... the ship was pushed.”

  “Pushed where?” Hassan growled.

  The technician hesitated. “Unknown vector. Our models can’t replicate the movement. It’s as if they... disappeared mid-frame.”

  Emilia slammed her console. “That doesn’t happen. Physics doesn’t just break like that.”

  “Unless they weren’t just pushed,” said a quiet voice from the back—Dr. Manav Bhatt, theoretical physicist and wormhole consultant to NASA. He was already pulling up a set of classified gravimetric readings.

  He pointed to a flickering anomaly on the deep-sky feed.

  “This shouldn’t be possible,” he said. “But that solar storm—it may have temporarily activated a dormant Einstein-Rosen bridge. A wormhole. If the trajectory intersected with its center—”

  “You’re telling me we lost humanity’s only deep-space crew to a wormhole?” Hassan barked.

  “I’m telling you we might not have lost them at all,” Bhatt replied, eyes locked on the data. “But they’re no longer in our sky.”

  A heavy silence fell over Mission Control.

  Behind them, the giant screen flashed red.

  CONNECTION LOST

  SIGNAL: NULL

  CREW STATUS: UNKNOWN

  Hassan turned toward the pressurized glass wall that overlooked the visitor observation bay. Families watched from behind it—parents, siblings, scientists who had spent years building this dream.

  He exhaled slowly. “Prepare an emergency press briefing. We say communications are down. We do not say we lost the ship.”

  “And what if we never find them again?” Emilia asked softly.

  Hassan didn’t answer.

  Instead, he stared at the sky map, now blank where five young cadets once drifted toward Mars, and whispered under his breath:

  “God help them, wherever they are.”