A dull ache began to throb behind Balun Dashiell’s eyes one late evening as he stood amidst the rhythmic hum of machines at the Dashiell Retrofit™ Orbital Foundry, high above the planet Kesh. He barely noticed it at first—his focus fixed on the maintenance logs scrolling across a datapad, his thoughts tangled in shipping manifests and long-range communications. There was still so much left to oversee before the next cycle, and yet, something began to feel... off.
The lights overhead flickered—not a mechanical glitch, but something deeper, stranger. The ambient sounds of the hangar faded to a muffled murmur, as if submerged underwater. His surroundings blurred at the edges, and without warning, reality folded away. He was no longer in the hangar.
Now he stood atop the exposed scaffolding of an unfinished starship, suspended in an endless void where the stars themselves were shattered like glass across a pitch-black canvas. Each jagged fracture pulsed with a sickly light, revealing clawed shapes writhing just beneath the surface of the void—limbs without bodies, hungering presences barely restrained.
A distant mechanical groan echoed through the vacuum, as if ancient gears were turning beneath space itself. In his hand, Balun found a datapad—his own—its display blinking frantic warnings. Hyperlane Instability. Starweird Presence Detected. The company logo still glowed at the corner, a faint mockery of normalcy amid the madness.
Then came a sound that cut deeper than any alarm—the thin, echoing cry of a child.
Turning sharply, Balun caught sight of his son, Kellan, sitting atop a tower of cargo crates in the shifting gloom. But something was wrong. The boy’s eyes—normally bright with curiosity—reflected a subtle, otherworldly red hue, hinting at the darkness of his Sith ancestry. His voice echoed unnaturally through the void, distorted like a corrupted recording: “The lanes are breaking... the lanes are breaking...”
Behind him, a figure emerged—indistinct, humanoid, cloaked in a veil of living shadow. It reached for Kellan with fingers like tendrils of ink drawn through water, a formless predator.
A jolt of raw, incandescent fear gripped Balun’s chest. He lunged forward, but the half-constructed vessel beneath his feet crumbled like ash. The void screamed as it split open, revealing a flood of writhing serpentine entities—Starweirds—spiraling outward across the cosmos, devouring light and thought alike. The Galaxy convulsed in silence.
Then, with a screeching metallic snap, the vision fractured like shattering duraglass.
Balun gasped as he was thrown back into the foundry’s hangar, collapsing to his knees. Harsh fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and reality reasserted itself with cruel clarity. Alarms rang out, echoing his name over the comms, summoning him back from the edge of something ancient and terrible—something that had seen him.
