Pathfinder Zero - Chapter Two: The Omen

Across the void of space, something awakened, a presence.

High above the shattered arc of the Ikaris, a black silhouette drifted. Nyx did not speak. She simply watched, she had seen stars be born, worlds collapse.

But this one, this human girl with silver hair, drifting unconscious in the shattered cryo-pod, she was different, like her.

A singularity...

Chapter Two: The Omen

Cryo-travel wasn’t glamorous, it was cold, quiet, and filled with dreams that faded.

Hana did not wake to wonder, but to pain, the ship, the Pathfinder-class Ikaris, was broken; a relic of hope turned ruin.

In the face of chaos, she didn’t retreat, she recalibrated, repaired, repurposed, she didn’t just survive, she reactivated the mission.

Only twelf  made it to Proxima B,

It was only the beginning...

Something old, immeasurably old, breathed through this planet soil and stone.

Twin suns bathed the land in amber light, arched ruins rose from the jungle, and buried deep within the planet’s surface, she found the signs, etchings, glyphs, power systems still humming beneath moss and crystal, language that bent logic, artifacts that responded to thought.

She studied for days, maybe weeks, maybe years.

Time slipped, as it often did here, and in the ruins, she found a name, not in English, not even in sound, but in meaning.

The Elder Hollow...life itself trembled at the name.

This place wasn’t abandoned...

It was preserved, like it had been waiting.

One day she find a Temple, she stepped past the threshold, and the air changed, denser, quieter, like walking into a thought still echoing through time.

At the center stood a fractured monolith, tall, jagged, humming faintly. When she touched it, the surface didn’t change, reality did, and then it spoke without sound:

“When the Hollow stirs, the Veil will bleed.”

The glyph blazed to life, and around it, six more pillars responded, one in the center, black and silent, pulsing with a darkness that seemed to drink the light around it, an omen.

Each pillar bearing a prophecy...

Hana stepped back, breath caught, for a moment, it felt as if the air itself had folded inward, memory and prophecy wrapped around her like a net of stars.

But then… they arrived. It began with a ripple of wind across the arches, a tremor, a flash, a thunder.

A man, no..., something more than a man, in black armor, wielding a hammer that bled molten fury, and facing him, a figure glowing gold, radiant with myth, defiant.

She didn’t know his name yet.

But her pulse surged.

The black one struck, a soundless quake, the golden one fell, like a dying sun.

Without thinking, Hana reached into her satchel, pulled an artifact, a ringed device with anchors of obsidian and star-metal, she didn’t know how it worked, but she knew what it was for.

Extraction.

A teleport beacon, a gift from the ancients.

Her fingers hesitated only for a second.

Then she activated it.

Light warped, space screamed, and the fallen warrior vanished from the edge of death.

To Be Contine