There is a kind of silence that doesn't belong in nature—too deep, too wide, like something sacred has died and the universe is holding its breath.
That's the silence I remember when Velmora burned.
Before the Kargal Empire came, we believed ourselves untouchable. Our cities shimmered with crystal towers, our air was clean, our minds open to the ancient sciences left behind by the Precursor civilizations. We were proud, too proud. We believed in treaties. In reason. In mercy.
The empire believed in none of those things.
When the skies above Velmora tore open with black iron and violet flame, it took them a single cycle to crush our fleets. Two more to glass our largest cities. After that, there was no more resistance. Only screams. And that silence. The kind that seeps into the bones and makes a man forget who he was.
I remembered because I had to.
Because to forget was to die twice.
That was seven cycles ago.
Since then, I have worn chains. Not iron—not those could be broken. What the Kargali use are collars—black metal bands infused with nanothread. One wrong thought, one act of defiance, and they constrict. Burn. Blind. Kill.
I became slave #88-Kiro under the dominion of Lord Vaskor, a mid-tier noble of the empire with too much ambition and not enough mercy. I mine crystal-ore in the shadow pits of Gaethek-4, a dead moon riddled with veins of aetherium. Our shifts run twenty hours. The air is thin. Food comes once every two days, if we're lucky. Water is laced with stimulants to keep us moving. Those who falter are taken. No one ever returns.
But death isn't the only fate worse than slavery in the empire.
Once a year, during the Feast of Dominion, the lords celebrate their conquest the only way they know: through spectacle.
The Hunting Games.
Fifty slaves. Dropped into the wilderness of Gaeth-9, a moon shaped into a living labyrinth of death. For three days, we are hunted. For sport. For entertainment.
This year, my number was called.
They gave us nothing but ragged clothes, boots worn through, and collars still blinking red. We were herded into a dropship, each of us shackled to the floor, silent as cattle waiting for slaughter.
A man beside me whispered, voice rough from disuse.
"They hunt our bodies, but their true prey is our souls."
The dropship doors opened mid-descent. Wind screamed through the hold. The scent of burning ozone and alien forests filled my nostrils. I looked down and saw hell.
Jagged cliffs. Violet trees twisting toward broken moons. Rivers glinting oily black. And in the shadows... movement. Shapes.
We were not sent to fight.
We were sent to die.