All through the same unmarked hour, star‑pilots, temple adepts, and unaware children alike slipped into a seamless, soundless nightmare.
They drifted weightless inside a corridor of shattered durasteel. Overhead, the deck plating had peeled back like flower petals, exposing a cosmic void glimmering with faint ion sparks. Silence reigned so deeply it seemed to press against eardrums—until a thin, metallic ping echoed through the hull, amplifying along bulkheads in diminishing ripples. Every dreamer instinctively turned toward the source, only to find the corridor branching into three identical passages, each ending in a sealed blast‑door scrawled with half‑burned registry numbers.
Breath fogged in the absolute cold. Bodies—crew suspended mid‑motion—floated just beyond reach, eyes wide, limbs frozen in the slow ballet of micro‑gravity. Their stiffened fingers pointed toward different navigation beacons stenciled across the walls: one marked N‑57, another K‑12, the third D‑34. As the silent ping repeated, those digits flared ghost‑green, then reversed themselves as though time had hiccupped. On the third ping, every beacon's lettering collapsed into a single fragment of a coord‑string, flickering backward—seven numerals, one missing.
The corridor windows glitched, revealing a fractured starfield where duplicates of each visible star hovered a handspan out of phase, like reflections in unseen glass. In that double sky the dreamers briefly saw their own silhouettes mirrored, but the reflections moved two steps ahead, forever slightly ahead of now. A vertigo of déjà vu swept through the vision; some reached out, trying to touch their future selves, and felt only cold static.
Suddenly the silence ruptured. A murmured chant—voices overlapping in wrong order—flowed from the three passages at once, forming an unsettling echo that arrived before the sound that birthed it. On the final pre‑echo a flock of pale, hollow‑eyed shapes drifted past the windows, their limbs tapering into ragged wisps—Starweirds nesting among wreckage that had never quite reached realspace. One creature turned its empty gaze inward, cracked a grin that split like broken glass, and every light snapped to black.
Dreamers jolted awake gasping for breath, fingertips numb as if sunk in liquid nitrogen. Each bore a fine chalk‑white scar etched across one palm: the rune for "mirror" fractured by a missing stroke. When the scar brushed a starchart projection, the skin tingled only when the map displayed a narrow Mid‑Rim corridor—an uncharted pocket sailors sometimes call the Silent Mirror, where a vanished convoy's transponders still ping once a year, doomed to repeat a signal that outruns itself by three minutes.
Cartographers, smugglers, and search‑and‑rescue captains now mutter of a nav string missing one digit—a digit perhaps decoded by aligning beacon codes N, K, and D with forgotten Convoy manifests. Somewhere in that ghost‑ridden grave of ships floats a core that listens to tomorrow before today arrives—waiting for anyone brave enough to board a vessel that never finished its jump and bargain with echoes that speak out of sequence.
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.
