CRITICAL MASS

Chapter 1: Jabberwocky

This ship used to have an important name.

Back when there were thousands of people to call it by that name. Now, barely a hundred humans remained inside this empty, floating cathedral.

As far as anyone else in the galaxy was concerned, The Fayde, flagship of the Nestorian Tetrarchy, had suffered a Fulmination Emergence Incident, and the entire crew had been swallowed by hell itself. May their souls find the glory of hope. Amen.

Well, it was true … Grand Sister Admiral Aurelia did release all the bindings to the ship’s core, some anorexic, frail halfdemon did rattle against the hull for a couple of days but that’s not what killed thousands of inquisitors.

Aurelia sent most of them off on escape pods with a nice pension. Her pet Archangel took care of the more… zealous ones. Only the very few she could trust remained now…the ones that mattered to her. They no longer had to oversee the seeding of entire suffering planet farms, no longer had to harvest said planets and carry the embryos of demons across the void.

No more orders. No more masters.

Only the door, and the call that throbbed behind it.

Even by depleting the entire cargo, literally millions of souls worth of demonic encasements, the journey would still take months.

Good. This gives her time to prepare.

“We are close.”

Said Vesperis, the entirety of the Fayde’s computational power given voice and reason. It’ was always cold and clinical:

“Final sacrament will be required.”

“You don’t arrive at this place” came another voice, slithering into her thoughts.

“You become it.”

Aurelia gave the order.

“Take us in.”

The ship pulled the life from the surviving crew, each confined in their pain-vats, willing sacrifices, all so she could reach inside.

“Location attained.” said the Vesperis, its voice ragged now, corrupted by the blood of so many martyrs.

“Welcome to Terminus. Estimated age: predates entropy.”

The inner structure was navigable. The ship drifted through it like a key into a lock. They were no longer peering through peepholes. They were the key. This was the door about to open.

Aurelia detached the straps off her listening cradle, limbs atrophied and a headache so deep her vision blurred red.

The giant main gates of the ship groaned as they opened, a sound like rusted stars being dragged across iron skies.

The space resembled a decrepit cathedral but the scale was all wrong, made of black stone with gold irisations. Aurelia stepped into it barefoot, robes scorched at the hem. Columns rose around her, too high, too curved. They bent inward, like a throat about to swallow.

She moved forward with the steadiness of ritual, hand near her blade, words of the Vesperis still whispering behind her:

"Location: unstable. Entity detected."

"Designation: unknown. Signature: myth."

At the far end of the apse stood a figure of impossible symmetry and unbearable gravity. A man-shaped idea dressed in golden cloth, glowing with perfect theological contempt.

“Ah, there you are!” It said, voice as soft as ash, as sharp as judgment. “The one who knocked.”

“I didn’t knock, I had a key”

"You knew the cost," he countered. “But you lit the engines anyway. You ended ninety-one lives to turn the key in my door.”

Aurelia’s posture hunched, her resolve visibly diminished: “Each of them made this choice.”

“It would not have worked if they hadn’t. We both know that… oh, sister… the bridges you burned to get to me. Have you forgotten the planets you harvested, the oceans of lonely eyes?”

“You are primordial misalignment…star of the morning” she said the last part breathing in and making the sign of the cross.

“We are a bit too deep for that ancient gesture to help, don’t you find?”

"You’ve come far, little sister," he said smoothly, voice like a choir losing faith mid-hymn. “Burned your name, your crew, your orders… all for truth?”

“For choice.” she answered.

He smiled, a slow, cruel curve. “There is no such thing.”

He paced slowly, hands clasped behind his back, voice rising, filling the chamber with his golden red presence.

“Choice is the pretty mask he dressed our inevitabilities in, while we ...”

He stopped suddenly, a flicker of unease crossing his features. His foot caught on something, an invisible thread stretched taut across the floor.

His eyes darted down, wide with sudden horror.

“No…” he whispered, voice trembling, “What did you bring here…what did you do?”

He bent down, fingers trembling as they grasped the thread.

“This isn’t your domain… this is mine.” almost whimpering.

From the shadows of the unseen arches above him descended the thin silhouette of a spider, a giant mass of endless clicking limbs.

Confidence shattered, he tried to turn and run, but it was too late.

The thing wrapped around him with terrible hunger, teeth like stone thorns sinking deep.

His screams ended in their own echo and the sound of shattering bones.

Aurelia’s breath caught. The spider turned toward her.

It skittered through the vast space with the swiftness of something that ignores time.

It stopped in front of her: one of its limbs made a quick precise movement, describing a square as if carving a piece of reality and then the space between Aurelia and the spider was occupied by a mirror, surface pooling with liquid hate.

Her eyes met her own reflection in the black, glassy surface but something was deeply wrong. Her reflection was upside-down, lips stretched into a grin that wasn’t hers, too many teeth, too much delight in the wrong places. The reflection’s eyes glittered with something wet, dark and unblinking.

“Unmannered, wasn’t I? A tear in the muscle of my courtesy.”

Each word came with the faint sound of clicking fangs from behind the mirror, like a puppet speaking while the mouth stays hidden.

“It was in the middle of unspooling its sound-shape, but I do loathe that pattern. It repeats itself like a tesselation of pride.”

Aurelia’s reflection opened its mouth and black blood began poring over glazed eyes and hanging hair, then the voice became dozens of overlapping versions, some whispering, some screaming, some laughing:

“I see the organ where you keep your …uncertainty”the last word changing with each voice: “hesitation” “indecision” ”doubts!”

“I see it, soft and translucent, fluttering like a trapped moth between projections of what could happen if you were to … set me loose.”

Chapter 2: Rat King

One of the Fayde’s duties was exploration and prospecting.

Aurelia was given a ration of encasements she was free to use in order to travel to unprospected systems and establish infant signal colonies.

They found it drifting far from its star, locked in a slow, impossible orbit.

Barely visible through the viewport it was…just a glassy black sphere, its surface patterned with geometry reminiscent of occult sigils.

From orbit, Aurelia thought it looked like a black pearl suspended in a web, threads so faint they only caught the light at certain angles. The Fayde descended into silence, engines throttled low. No wind to answer them. No atmosphere to stir. Only the Vesperis voice filling the command vault:

“Surface composition: carbon and vitrified polymer. Traces of engineered biomass.”

Her landing crew waited at the gate: the Archangel, silent and towering, the Vesperis spherical avatar drifting among them, two magistrates, three scriptors and the mandatory warden that was already getting on her nerves.

The dark mirror surface of the endless wasteland was scarred with minuscule ondulated lines that seemed to converge in a point far beyond the horizon.

As they went on this strange pilgrimage, the few stars above them were mirrored in the featureless black surface of the planet so that it felt like they were walking through deep space.

Elevation started dropping in concentric ripples. They knew they reached something of importance only because they had been walking for half a day and this was the first change of any kind they encountered. In the center of this artificial crater was a cube, about as tall as a man, made of the same matter as the rest of the planet, but it lacked the striation lines, if fact Aurelia noticed, it mirrored nothing of its surroundings.

The warden stepped in front of everyone and knocked his staff against the smooth ground:

“Sister Aurelia, you must stop this at once! This madness must end, we must let the Tetrarchy know of this accursed place, you know the word of the law, if you encounter any trace of xenos be it may extinct, you are to flag the planet and retreat immediately, you are a prospector, we are done here, I believe this mangled thing you call an Archangel is still in sync with the Divine Hive, so back home, the news about this will arrive within the hour, or more? I don’t even know how far you took us this time, why you insist on porting so far into the unknown instead of taking systems in the natural exploration order is beyond me”

“Enough.”

Aurelia interrupted him, still looking at the monolithic cube, she took a slight step to the side as if to let Iskandar know he can move forward. His wings radiated light for less then a second, barely unfolding and the colossus was next to the warden. From under his cloak emerged a multijointed limb, ending in a talon that closed over the man’s face. Blood welled where the claws bit the flesh. Then, a muffled protest from a highborn that confused authority with power:

“Stop this at once, take this abomination off me! What are you doing admiral?”

“Prospecting.” Aurelia smiled.

She nodded and Iskandar began dragging the man towards the cube, arms and legs flailing, the scriptors following close behind.

It pressed his face to the monolith, and after a few seconds the cube decided to mirror the warden, and only him. Silver threads like the ones they’ve been following all day began to dig into his skin, leaving bloody gashes behind. He was screaming the whole time but when the lines got to his chest he stopped. He tore himself free of Iskandar’s grip, turning toward them. A black tentacle now connected the cube to the back of his head.

For a moment he looked asleep. Then his eyes snapped open, black and bottomless, and his voice came fast, frantic, as if trying to outrun something.

“She hungers. She’s dying. She fed on the last thoughts of an entire species.”

“She devours the hollow ache when the expected pattern collapses into static, erasing the possibility of resonance.”

“She was bloated once. Too many eons have passed. She waited too long ...too long in the dark”

The black tendril recoiled, slurping back into the cube, leaving no mark on it’s surface. The warden’s body collapsed face-down.

“This comes with us.” Aurelia said, pointing at the cube. Then she just turned and started walking away.

“Grand Sister… isn’t it dangerous? What is it?” Romulus asked, voice shaking.

“The most dangerous thing you have ever seen.” she said. “A demon that ended a civilization, half mad with hunger.”

“And we take it why?”

“Magistrate Romulus, have you heard of people on forgotten, starving planets eating leather strap soup? Do you know what they eat after that?”

“Yes, Admiral, after that…they eat their own kind”

He was visibly disgusted at the thought.

Aurelia explained: “This thing has no concept of pain or despair. What it feeds on, you can’t provide. Unless you want to offer your mind to it like our leather strap warden, I suggest you start moving.”

Chapter 3: Thread

The ship hums. The hum is not the ship.

The hum is beneath her skin. In her sleep her eyes are backwords, liquid. Flowing over corners.

Someone waits in the corner. Sometimes a shadow. Sometimes a man. Sometimes both. He speaks in pieces:

“Do you see it yet?”

“Not yet.”

“The layer beneath. We can meet here sometimes.”

She nods because she thinks it is polite. But the nod is swallowed. Everything is swallowed. The man bends her mind as she bends the image of him, she is fond of him, her secret.

“Hunger is patient. Hunger is slow. Do not look. Only listen and do.”

The floor folds under her. She steps through dark coridors, blurred like the momory of a place, but this is not her momory. She feels wet glass slide down her spine. Black wet glass.

“Follow the spiral Aurelia, your purpose is not to understand.”

“Will you trust me?”

She thinks she does. She thinks she will. She thinks she wants to.

“I cannot touch you. Not yet. But I can show you.”

“You don’t arrive at this place”

“You become it.”

He reaches. A hand of smoke. Something slides into her mind. Fragments. Maps. Hunger. Glass. Thread.

“You must go. You must.”

She wakes. Or she thinks she wakes. The console blinks at her. Orders flash across the screen. Cold steel. Routine. Control.

And deep beneath it, something trembles. Something that waits in the dark spiral she has begun to trace. She remembers the man. The wet glass. A name.

The man in the dream is not a dream. He is the Lurker at the end of the spiral. The one who Hunger speaks to instead of shattering her mind, a sacrifice.

“What is your name?”

Chapter 4: Anathema

Grand Sister Admiral Aurelia is the human responsible for the most deaths in the entire history of our species. By releasing the skittering hunger, she is directly responsible for the galaxy wide event we now call the Hellfall. She ended demon exploitation.

The skyships fell. Cities that floated above volcanic plains, seas of methane, acid-drenched deserts, their suspension cradles were demon-fed. They tumbled screaming into the abyss.

Anyone caught in deep space aboard a ship was stranded, condemned to drifting at combustion reactor speeds until they suffocated or froze inside their iron tombs.

Thousands of planets starved without convoy barges ever reaching them again. Atmosphere filtration and terraforming stations were left in darkness. Hundreds of millions of people chocked on their own carbon dioxide.

When a galaxy-wide civilization is kept afloat by a single thread, demon-fire running in circles around every planet, every industry, what do you do when the kite string is cut?

Even agriculture turned to ash. The lamps that imitated suns on starless colonies guttered into darkness. The fields shriveled, the gene-grains withered. Famine walked unchallenged from one horizon to another.

As for Prosperous, self-sufficient worlds…well, they were set aflame by wars over the little that remained.

And still, there were stranger losses. The libraries of the Tetrachy, Sancta Sanctorum, even Imperial Achives, memory-engines, demon-inked, died in their sleep. Histories unraveled, records crumbled, entire cultures with their past erased and forgotten forever.

However, pockets of humanity endured, rising from the mud of far away places and ready to turn history into myth.

Revelation warned that the Apocalypse would come when the gates of Hell opened and demons roamed free across the plains of men.

Revelation lied: Apocalypse began when the gates closed forever.