The Null Shard sat in its containment cradle like a heart that refused to beat.
Kael watched it through a layer of hardened glass, the orb's black surface rippling ever so slightly, as though reality itself were being inhaled by it. No hum. No glow. Only presence. A silence so complete it threatened to swallow thought.
He hadn't slept in 26 hours.
"You're pushing it," Lira said from the doorframe, arms crossed. "The Null isn't just some artifact. It's playing with you."
Kael turned his head slightly. "It doesn't play. It listens."
"And what are you doing?"
Kael held up his wrist module. The latest scans showed faint fractal patterns emanating from the Null Shard, like spirals of collapsing code.
"Trying to speak."
Lira stepped in, boots silent on the metallic floor. "That thing nearly unraveled your mind last time. We don't even know if it's sentient. Could be a virus. Could be the absence of one."
Kael's eyes narrowed. "Or it could be the only thing capable of answering what the Cadence really is."
He turned to the console and tapped a sequence. The chamber lights dimmed, and a pulsing wave of harmonic resonance—an echo—spread into the containment chamber.
The Null Shard responded.
Not audibly.
But visibly.
The spirals pulsed back—a mimicry. A pattern in return. It was… talking.
Kael froze.
Lira's jaw tightened. "You got a reply?"
Kael stared at the readout. "Not a reply. A… mirror."
Elsewhere on the Echohound, Nira and Rax monitored energy fluctuations. The Null Shard's pulse was beginning to resonate with the ship's power core.
"This isn't good," Nira muttered. "That Shard's drawing harmonics from the core matrix."
Rax frowned. "Like it's trying to… tune itself?"
She blinked. "Wait. That's it. It's not just responding to Kael's signal—it's calibrating."
"To what?"
"To him."
Kael was already ahead of them.
The Null Shard had mirrored his resonance signature—not to mimic him, but to synchronize.
Kael removed the safety seal from the console and placed his palm on the interface pad.
"Kael, no—" Lira tried to stop him, but it was too late.
The Null Shard's containment barrier flickered.
Time didn't slow.
It stopped.
He stood in a place with no light and no sound, but not darkness.
It was before darkness.
Before time.
Before stories.
Kael felt himself—not in body, but as a thought adrift in a sea of anti-music. A sound that had never been sung. He felt something watching him, not as a being, but as a void recognizing form.
Then—
"Who speaks?"
The voice was not a voice. It was a memory of silence being broken.
Kael answered—not in words, but in intention.
He showed it his journey. His loss. The fragments. The Cadence. The way reality bent around Shards. The betrayal of memory. The voices in his dreams.
The voice responded.
"You chase echoes. But the first sound was never yours."
Kael asked the question that had haunted him for years: What are the Shards?
And the answer came in a form not spoken but impressed into his being.
The Shards were never fragments.
They were instruments.
Each one designed to carry a specific frequency—echoes from the first story ever told. A song so powerful it had to be broken into pieces, scattered across dimensions.
The Cadence was the composer, now gone mad with loneliness.
The Null Shard was never part of the ensemble.
It was the last safeguard.
The eraser.
Kael fell backward, gasping as the Null Shard severed the connection and resealed itself. Lira caught him before he hit the floor.
His hands trembled. His nose bled. His eyes flickered with afterimages of things not meant to be seen.
"Kael—Kael!" Lira shouted.
He gripped her arm. "It's not just about power. It's about story. Each Shard plays a role in a song that's still being written."
"What song?"
He turned to the containment glass.
"One that ends the universe if completed."
The war room was silent as Kael delivered the revelation.
"The Shards aren't weapons. They're narrative devices. Carriers of influence—memetic gravity. The Cadence wants them assembled because it's trying to finish its symphony."
"And when it does?" Nira asked, tight-lipped.
"The story ends," Kael said. "Not metaphorically. Literally. The fabric of what we call choice, chance, emotion—everything—gets overwritten by the final note."
Rax leaned back. "So we're in a song, and we're about to be the last verse."
"Unless we stop it," Lira added.
Kael stood slowly. "No. We do more than stop it. We rewrite it."
But the Cadence wasn't idle.
As if it had felt the intrusion into its domain, a pulse tore through the galaxy.
Entire listening posts went dark.
AI-anchored satellites began broadcasting static.
Planets that once sang with harmonic energy now screamed in dissonance.
And in the uncharted edges of space, the first of the Echoed Warlords rose from the dust of forgotten wars.
Kael stared at the star map.
Everything was moving faster now.
The Shards weren't waiting to be found.
They were choosing sides.
And not all of them wanted the universe to survive.