Sleep claimed thousands in an instant—pilots nodding off in cockpit jump‑seats, archivists face‑down on illuminated folios, Sith and Jedi alike sinking mid‑meditation—only to hurl them into the same chasm of starlit black.
They hovered in perfect vacuum before a world‑machine so vast the eye could not hold its edges. A titanic gear, studded with broken teeth the size of mountain ranges, rotated the wrong way against the Milky veil. Each revolution scraped sparks across reality: flares of white heat that sheared hyperlanes into ribbons and scattered them like dying comets. Around the gear drifted the mutilated remnants of ancient ring‑cities—abandoned scaffolds, shattered prism towers, and inert Dyson segments tumbling in slow ballet.
Three beams of colored light—crimson, cerulean, and auric—carved across the starless void, orbiting the gear at different latitudes. From time to time the beams converged, striking an empty patch of space and irising open a black ellipse rimmed with crystalline facets. Within the oval shimmered an impossible corridor of glass, each pane reflecting a different galactic map: one whole, one fractured, one utterly alien. The corridor dilated, inviting—then snapped shut when the beams drifted out of phase.
As the dreamers beheld this, a low mechanical choir rolled through their bones:
"Δ RA… Δ Dec… Δ Mass‑Shadow… bind the three, open the eye."
The mantra repeated until the numbers themselves—too quick to grasp—burned after‑images behind eyelids.
Suddenly, the cosmic gear shuddered as though striking an invisible jam. A face emerged along its rim—an Alpha Starweird, colossal, pallid, veins of void for eyes—gnawing at the machine's surface, swelling with every strip of reality it devoured. Then all light collapsed inward, leaving dreamers floating in total darkness pierced by a single point of turquoise radiance far, far away.
They awoke in cold sweat. On every forehead a fleeting sigil burned and faded: three tiny chevrons merging into an elongated diamond—the Null Ellipse. Those who raced to star‑charts discovered the mark pulsed with heat only when the map centered on a silent Mid‑Rim blind zone where nav buoys have long registered nothing at all—except, once every cycle, a fluke of sensor noise matching Δ Right‑Ascension, Δ Declination, and Δ Hyperspace Mass‑Shadow differentials whispering through rumor circles as "the Calladene coordinates."
Scholars now suspect that only by aligning the three Keys—Blood, Echo, Axis—atop those deltas can the crystalline corridor be forced open and the misaligned gear set right… or broken beyond all hope, if the Starweird's hunger reaches the heart of the machine first.
OOC: Feel free to claim one of these visions as hints to how to complete a soon to be dropped mission. Whichever seems the most interesting between BLOOD, ECHO, AXIS, and CALLADENE.
