The Hunger Between the Lanes
The stars had always been a comfort to Joren Vance. Little beacons of continuity in a galaxy constantly slipping into chaos. He’d never been a soldier, or a Jedi, or even a proper smuggler—just a long-haul spacer with a decent ship, a soft spot for rehydrated stew, and a growing pension of debts. The Wayfarer’s Gambit wasn’t much to look at anymore, but it got him where he needed to go. Usually.
The hum of the hyperdrive filled the cockpit like a lullaby. He took a sip from his battered thermos and watched the swirl of hyperspace beyond the viewport.
Then the scream came.
It wasn't auditory, not really. It was a sensation, like nails dragging down the inside of his skull. Lights flickered. The hum turned to a shriek. Joren lunged for the control panel, but the navicomputer was spasming, blinking red across every panel.
The Gambit was yanked from hyperspace like a fish on a line.
Starlines shattered into individual pinpricks, and the cockpit burst into a storm of alarms and warnings. The ship tumbled, stabilizers overcompensating as it drifted into a pocket of space that hadn’t been on any chart.
Debris floated like corpses. Hulks of ships, split open like fruit, drifted aimlessly in a ballet of broken dreams.
And then he saw it.
It loomed just beyond the graveyard of vessels—a mass too vast to comprehend, shifting with slow, almost biological intention. At first, it resembled a station, or maybe a malformed asteroid cluster. But then it pulsed. Veins of bio-luminescence traced along its hull. It breathed.
“Nope. Nope, nope, nope,” Joren muttered, slamming the throttle into reverse. The ship didn't respond.
Tendrils unfurled from the entity, each one a segmented nightmare of chitin and flesh, bone and steel. They drifted with casual menace through the vacuum, reaching slowly, surely.
Lights failed. Systems collapsed. Joren felt weightless, breath catching as the cold crept in. He drew his blaster, as if the familiar weight might protect him from the impossible.
A shape moved in the corridor.
Tall, humanoid, but all wrong. Its proportions were broken. Bones elongated and misplaced. Its face—a mask of stretched, gray matter—smiled.
“Stay back!” he barked, firing. Bolts lanced through the thing as if it were mist.
It raised a hand. Tendrils sprang from its palm and shot forward.
Joren didn’t scream.
There was no time.
The instant the tendrils pierced his chest, everything inverted. His memories detonated inward. His identity fractured and dispersed. What was once Joren Vance became something else entirely.
It was not a new mind. It was not even a mind at all.
The consciousness that called itself Mr. Usher stirred within its Host.
Only a few centuries old, Mr. Usher was a product of Sith alchemy and aberration—a corrupted amalgam of a Nether Devil, hosted in a vessel grown from synthetic flesh, dark rituals, and the egos of the consumed.
The newest addition—Joren’s memories—folded into the chorus. His thoughts became ambient noise. The concept of a "Joren" was diluted within seconds, not removed, merely indistinct. Another echo in the hive.
The Host pulsed with newfound urgency. Beyond its armored, biomechanical bulk, its true mind—the Ego—drifted in the Nether like a leech suspended in metaphysical pitch-black ink. The Nether boiled with turbulence, rippling with Force distortions. Souls screamed in languages long dead.
Mr. Usher felt them all.
And among the chaos, something stood still.
Calladene
Not seen. Not heard. Felt. A gravitational paradox of empathy and entropy. The Ego of Mr. Usher reached, pressing its awareness outward across chasms of shadow. Calladene shimmered like a soul aflame through fog—beautiful, terrible, mournful.
He could not understand it.
Worse: it did not fear him.
The Ego recoiled, but not in terror. In hunger.
He would consume it, or unravel it. Whatever it was. Whatever it meant. But first, he had to evolve.
The Host responded.
Three new scouts launched from its hidden womb-chambers—living vessels, stitched from spacer wrecks and organic mass, each one humming with the borrowed instincts of former captains. They broke into the disrupted lanes, seeking answers. Seeking prey.
They drifted across shattered trade routes, through nav-hazards and derelicts, until they reached the edge of a dead star system where even light refused to linger.
It came.
A Starweird.
White hair billowed in the airless dark. Long limbs swam through space like tattered cloth caught in water. Glowing eyes pierced the void, and their mouths did not open, but the scream came anyway.
It screamed.
Psychic, corrosive, relentless. One scout ruptured mid-transmission, its biomass writhing as its mind devoured itself.
Another tried to fight. Tendrils lashed out, grappling incorporeal foes. But claws of cold hatred phased through plating, slicing soul and matter alike.
They weren't just killing; They were unmaking.
Inside the third scout, Mr. Usher's Ego focused.
It descended, folding itself partially from the Nether, tethering its will to the scout like a parasite in a puppet.
It extended Force tendrils, not through realspace, but through shadow, unraveling the veil of corporeality with the dark reflections of the Force and the echoes of the dead.
It whispered in languages older than bones. The Dark Side flowed like a tide of ash.
The Starweird noticed.
It turned.
Where there should have been terror, there was recognition.
Something about the Ego reminded the Starweird of itself. Something twisted, mirrored.
It lunged - but the scout vessel was ready.
As the creature phased into the vessel, the Ego engulfed it with psychic gravity—a net woven of hatred, entropy, and artificial identity. It pressed in with Force-born pressure. It fed. It learned.
The Starweird's incorporeal form began to fray; Its shrieks turned inward. The void around the ship warped, shadows rippling like disturbed water. The Ego consumed it not as biomass, but as an ethereal pattern.
Thought. Emotion. Power.
When the struggle ended, the scout floated alone, dimly pulsing, altered. It lingered for but a moment before altering its course.
Inside, where once there was only tissue and memory, there was now something else.
A ghost-song.
The scout returned, slipping through folds in space to the mothership. It docked with the Host ship. The biomass transferred.
The Host, the once-man still in the straightjacket from a cruel alchemical experiment, convulsed.
The Ego shifted, taking in the new memories- no.. patterns.
New awareness emerged. It could now see what it could not before: flickers in the aether, echoes of spirit, memory residue. Not merely through the Nether, but through waking space.
Mr. Usher could reach. He could haunt. The realm of hyperspace was no longer beyond his reach.
New chambers formed in the Host—wombs of incorporeal grafting. Where once it could only consume flesh, now it could siphon essence.
He drifted again into the Nether, bolstered.
Calladene lingered far across the tapestry, still brilliant, still distant.
Still incomprehensible.
No longer untouchable.
Mr. Usher would find it.
And when he did— either it would serve the Ego, or it would become part of it.
Dormant isolation and secrecy were no longer a priority.
The womb-chambers spit out a new fleet, vessels to collect data, spirits, memories. To siphon essence and store knowledge to feed the Ego.
Far behind, in the vessel once called the Wayfarer’s Gambit, a flicker of thought trembled.
Not a rebellion, Just a memory.
The echo of a name:
Joren.
Then it was gone, lost in the laughter of a thousand dead voices, each trying to remember who had screamed first.
