The Echohound drifted silently above the shattered lands as night crept like spilled ink over the horizon. Inside the ship, the silence wasn't just an absence of sound—it was a pressure. An unspoken fear that clawed at every breath.
Kael stood alone in the observatory chamber, staring at the void beyond the reinforced glass. The stars twinkled like indifferent witnesses, but after the Cadence's message, they no longer looked like distant suns.
They looked like scars.
"You haven't spoken in hours," Lira said softly as she entered. She kept her voice low, as if the ship itself might be listening.
Kael didn't turn. "I heard something down there. Felt something. It wasn't just an echo—it was an intention."
Lira walked up beside him. "You think the Cadence is alive?"
"I think it always was."
She sighed. "So… what now?"
Kael finally turned to her. "We find the next Shard. Before the Cadence does."
The next clue came from an unlikely source.
Rax intercepted a coded transmission originating from a derelict communication satellite once used by the Sovereign Fleet. It wasn't broadcasting coordinates—but music.
A haunting melody made of harmonic sequences far too advanced for anything in the current database. It was old. Older than Sovereign tech. Older than anything native to their star cluster.
But Kael recognized it.
It was the same song the Cadence sang in the resonance chamber.
"It's a calling card," he said, eyes cold. "It's daring us to come."
Nira parsed the data. "It's pointing toward the Sable Vault, orbiting the dead planet Rith IX. That vault was supposedly lost during the Sundering War."
"And what's inside?" Lira asked.
"Anything too dangerous to be forgotten," Kael replied.
Three days later, they stood in the vacuum of space, staring at the broken silhouette of the Sable Vault. A lunar-sized structure of interlocking hexagonal plates, its surface charred and cratered. Its systems were dead—yet something pulsed faintly in the core.
As they docked, the entrance bay groaned open, as if it had been waiting.
Inside, the station felt more like a crypt than a vault.
Frozen bodies floated in zero-g, sealed in containment suits that bore ancient insignias—symbols from factions that had ceased to exist for centuries. Burned into the walls were sigils of warning written in dozens of lost languages.
They moved cautiously through the corridors.
The deeper they went, the louder the melody became.
Not through the comms.
Not through the air.
But in their bones.
They reached the inner sanctum of the vault, a spherical chamber that defied physics—gravity flipped and twisted here, as if the space was folding in on itself. In the center floated a glass orb the size of a man, filled with swirling smoke and sparks.
A Shard.
But unlike any they'd seen before.
It was black.
Void-black.
As if it drank light rather than reflected it.
"The Null Shard," Nira whispered. "It's theoretical. A fragment of silence so complete, it cancels resonance instead of amplifying it."
Kael stepped forward, his hand trembling.
But as he neared the orb, it spoke—not in words, but in memories.
He was not himself.
He was someone else.
A scientist. A traitor. A believer.
Inside a lab, years ago, watching the Null Shard awaken for the first time. He had screamed as the resonance tore through the lab, reducing minds into static. Not killing. Just removing.
Sound.
Thought.
Identity.
Back then, the Nine Thrones still existed.
They had underestimated what silence truly meant.
They had created a Shard that didn't echo—it erased.
Kael snapped back, gasping. The memory felt as real as his own past.
Lira was shouting. "Kael! Your vitals spiked!"
He turned to them slowly. "The Null Shard doesn't sing like the others."
"Then what does it do?" Rax asked.
Kael looked at the shard.
"It listens."
As they extracted the Shard into a containment field, the chamber pulsed—and the vault responded.
Doors sealed.
Gravity surged.
Alarms, long thought dead, screamed to life in an ancient tongue.
Security constructs—half-sentient resonance machines—awoke from hibernation. Shimmering, jagged beings formed of broken notes and sharp light emerged from the shadows.
"Hostiles incoming!" Nira shouted, charging her pulse rifle.
"Fall back!" Kael ordered. "Protect the Shard!"
They ran, fighting their way through twisting gravity and shrieking echoes that tried to tear thoughts apart. Every step was a battle against sound. Against the memory of silence.
Kael activated his mask, channeling its harmonic shield to buy them time.
Lira laid down suppressive fire.
Rax detonated a sonic mine, buying them fifteen seconds.
They made it to the docking bay.
Just as the vault collapsed inward.
The Echohound peeled away from the imploding vault, the shockwave chasing them into orbit.
In Kael's arms, the Null Shard trembled.
Not in fear.
In anticipation.
Later, in the ship's war room, they reviewed what little data survived the mission.
"The Null Shard isn't part of the Nine," Nira concluded. "It's older. A failed prototype. Or maybe the first true Shard."
"It doesn't sing," Kael said. "It listens. And records. It remembers things even the Cadence has forgotten."
"So now we have two forces at play," Lira said. "The Cadence that wants to be heard… and the Null that wants to hear."
Kael leaned back in his chair.
"Or worse. One wants to free the song. The other wants to erase it."
Rax scratched his head. "So where does that leave us?"
Kael looked out the viewport, eyes heavy.
"Between a scream and a silence."
But in the dark of the Echohound, the Null Shard stirred in its container.
And somewhere in the vast emptiness of space…
The Cadence stopped singing.
And started listening back.