The void was silence.
But not the peaceful silence of an empty room, but the kind of silence that devours. That extends beyond the senses and turns existence into a thin line between consciousness and nothingness.
Inside the pod, Kael Atreides hovered on that thin edge. The systems kept his body's vital signs stable, though the metallic chill surrounding him was a constant reminder of his condition: he was not a passenger. He was disposable cargo tossed into the abyss.
A faint flicker illuminated the panel before his eyes. The voice of the basic AI, devoid of all emotion, broke the monotony.
"Trajectory: no destination defined. Random course maintained. External conditions: stable."
Kael slowly turned his head toward the panel, his muscles numb from the forced stillness.
"Always so optimistic..." he murmured sarcastically, his voice raspy after hours, perhaps days, without speaking.
He knew the AI was merely a life-support system and rudimentary navigation, not a true interlocutor, but the need to hear his own voice was almost instinctive.
"Tell me, machine... how long until this coffin runs out of power?"
The light on the panel flickered before he answered in his neutral tone.
"Estimated projection: 27 standard cycles before total resource depletion."
Kael let out a short, dry laugh.
"27 cycles... They always thought it would be enough for him to die away from any unwelcome eyes."
He leaned back again, staring at the tiny viewfinder that displayed the endless blanket of stars. It was ironic. The Bene Gesserit had calculated every detail of his demise. But the universe, as always, didn't play by human rules.
A subtle shudder ran through the pod. Barely a vibration, as if something invisible had brushed against the structure. Kael opened his eyes, alert. The sensors began emitting a series of light pulses in an irregular sequence.
"What is this?" he asked quietly, slowly sitting up in the cramped space.
The AI responded, this time with a different nuance: a warning protocol.
"Gravitational anomaly detected. Unstable spatial warping in progress."
Kael frowned.
"Warp...?" His thoughts raced. "There are no fold paths here. No ships. What the hell...?"
The pod began to shake more violently. The internal lights flickered, and an invisible pressure pressed against Kael's chest, as if reality itself were stretching around him. Through the visor, he saw space distort. A point in the distance began to expand, a luminous fissure tearing through the absolute blackness of the cosmos.
The wormhole wasn't like the controlled fold paths he'd learned from the Spacing Guild navigators. This was chaotic, wild. A phenomenon that shouldn't exist there... and yet it was swallowing his pod effortlessly.
"Impossible evasive maneuver. Gravitational forces exceed structural limits," the AI announced.
Kael gritted his teeth as the pod was dragged helplessly. The light from the wormhole grew, blinding, distorting the stars into impossible vortices. He felt his stomach twist, not from fear, but from the brutality of the dimensional shift.
"If you're going to disintegrate me," he growled through gritted teeth, "do it quickly..."
But there was no disintegration.
There was an instant of absolute emptiness, where Kael lost all feeling in his body, where time stood still... and then, suddenly, reality reassembled itself with a dull impact.
The pod shot out to the other end of the space tunnel, staggering like a leaf caught in a gale. Internal alarms shrieked as the systems tried to stabilize.
Kael, stunned, opened his eyes as soon as he managed to regain control of his breathing. His vision was blurry, but something outside the scope caught his immediate attention.
There, suspended in the immensity, rose... something impossible.
A colossus.
A structure unmatched in his knowledge of the Imperium. A gigantic ring, slowly rotating on itself, covered in metallic patterns and landscapes that shouldn't be there: seas, mountains, artificial skies that curved to follow the shape of the structure.
Kael held his breath. Not out of astonishment—for astonishment was for the ignorant—but from the immediate calculation of what it represented.
"What is this...?" he whispered, more to himself than to the AI.
The monotone voice responded, unable to offer answers.
"Unknown entity. Estimated mass: incalculable. Artificial gravity detected. The pod is being pulled in."
The vibration in the ship intensified as it was captured by the Ring's gravitational field. Kael leaned closer to the visor, his eyes analyzing every detail of the surface as the distance closed.
"This is not the work of any House..." he murmured. Not Ix, not Tleilaxu. This is... ancient.
The pod began to enter the atmosphere contained within the Ring. The outer layers bore signs of technology that defied all Imperial logic. Massive spires, energy lines flowing like rivers of light, and floating structures orbiting invisible nodes.
The impact with the atmosphere was gentle, almost as if the structure itself were regulating the object's entry. The pod descended slowly toward a metal platform that unfurled from within the Ring, as if summoned.
Kael watched as the Ring's inner walls seemed to curve toward the horizon, an illusion impossible for any untrained human mind to process. But he didn't look away.
"Imminent surface contact," the AI announced.
The pod landed with a soft thud. All was silent except for the steady hum of energy vibrating beneath the platform.
Kael remained motionless for a few seconds, his thoughts racing at breakneck speed. Exile had condemned him to die alone in the void... but he had ended up in a place no Imperial mind could have imagined.
The panel flickered, indicating that the opening system was enabled.
Kael smiled slightly, that smile of his that wasn't one of joy, but of recognition at a new challenge.
"Well..." he murmured as he activated the mechanism. "If they thought the void was the end for me... they were far from imagining where I would end up."
The capsule's seal opened with a pressurized click. The air that entered had a metallic smell, clean but strange, alien to any natural atmosphere. Kael descended slowly, his boots echoing on the platform's surface.
He looked up at the immense towers that rose around him, listening to the faint pulse of energy that coursed through the structure like the beat of a mechanical heart.
He was alone. But he knew, deep within him, that something was watching him.
It wasn't death that had greeted him in this forgotten corner of the universe.
It was a legacy.
And Kael Atreides was ready to claim it.