Adam woke slicked in a cold sweat as he bolted upright in bed, eyes wide and wild. All sleep was shed in an instant leaving him alert and on edge in the near darkness.

His body felt like it was on fire, and his skin crawled giving him the sensation of fire ants swarming over him in a great an unstoppable wave.

Had he heard what he thought he heard?

Deus?

For a moment he thought perhaps it was simply a dream, his sleep addled brain attempting to parse out the memories of the past but turning to look out the window where the apparatus turned in a slow spiral, he knew soemthing was wrong. This wasn't simply a bad dream.

He squinted out into the vast reaches of space and watched as the distant diffused light from nearby stars glittered over the structure's complicated geometrical edges. Something wasn't right about that thing. And he only grew more uneasy as he watched starlight glitter over a million facets.

At his feet, Waffles shifted and hopped up from her bed trotting over to rest her old greying muzzle on his arm. Her eyes glittered reflecting blue pinpricks back into the darkness of the room. He patted her head and then clambered slowly to his feet. Sunny was still asleep where she rested, with her back facing him, and from her he could see the slow methodical rise and fall of her chest and sides as she slept.

And there it was again.

Slowly, quietly, as if he walked across a fragile shelf of ice, Adam reached down to belt on his prosthetic standing slowly from his bed to stand in the middle of the room. As he stood there, it was as if a sudden wave of cold washed over him, but now that he was awake, he could tell it wasn't a physical sensation per say, but a mental one, like someone was pouring cold water into his skull allowing ice water to rush in waves over the surface of his brain. The little hairs on the back of his neck and dorsal side of his body began to raise like the hackles on a dog. For her part waffles seemed unaffected by the feeling and scooted forward to rest herself on his feet, nosing at his hands. It had been a long time since she needed to use her training as a PTSD dog, and she couldn't tell the difference between that stress and the crawling anxiety he was experiencing now.

He wondered momentarily if she was right?

Was this simply a fabrication of his mind?

Was he having some sort of odd panic attack?

Those concerns died as ash a moment later, and a new fear rose to take its place only seconds later as the cold in his mind coalesced and condensed into one clear word.

Deus

It rang through his skull like a bell, and Adam knew right there and then that that voice was not his. It was strange and alien, made up of no specific voice he knew. It was a combination of a thousand voices heard, remembered, and stored away over the course of his lifetime echoing in aggregate inside his skull. Memories flashed inside his head: Pictures of the cobalt Nebulae, and the first experience he had ever had with Conn, still strange and otherworldly then.

But in those memories, Adam had been a helpless bystander to a world that was silent, but these weren't dreams or memories, this was now, and Adam had changed a lot since then. He closed his eyes and strained to listen concentrating on the sounds inside his head, and the telepathic waves which carried them.

The cold anxiety in his head morphed and separated into a thousand small pinpricks, each with their own aggregate intention.

All of them thinking one unified thing.

Deus.

Adam's eyes snapped open, and in a matter of moments, he had grabbed a pair of shoes and a shirt dashing out the door and down the hallway. Not to be left behind waffles raced at his feet confused at their sudden nightly run. The halls were dark except for the soft ambient orange/yellow glow that emanated from the walls, the Empyrean's way of protecting their proper sleep cycles.

With every step, the floor under Adam's feet erupted with a small burst of light.

Adam burst around the corner into the next intersection, and nearly collided with a dark shape going the same direction. They actually did collide last moment clipping each other in the shoulder and staggering backwards. Adam braced himself against the nearby wall, his brain working to catch up, and in the pale orange yellow light, not unlike firelight, he was not surprised to Find Lord Celex standing in the hallway.

He wore his human form, long technicolor hair falling in snarls around his face chest and shoulders bare like he too had just woken up.

"Did you hear it." Adam demanded but Lord Celex was already nodding

Struggling to reach out, Adam was not surprised to find Conn heading in their direction confirming to the two of them that he too had heard the sound

"What is it." Adam demanded through their mental connection.

It was a strange feeling, to have a conversation solely inside his head, but they were almost completely silent as they ran through the halls and disturbed almost no one. Waffles ran at their heels understanding nothing but doing her best to provide moral support.

She did a very good job.

"it sounds." Conn began, "Very distant, but..... In multitude....."

Inside his head the feeling began to strengthen.

Lord Celex was next to speak, "they are getting closer."

Adam didn't like the sound of that, "Could you be more ominous." He muttered under his breath, but he could feel that Lord Celex's interpretation was correct. There was many, and they were coming.

Together the three of them raced upward and onto the bridge, where the night crew was keeping watch in the dim ambience. Some of them had dozed off trusting the Empyrean to alert them to any changes. It was just as they were coming through the door that one of the proximity alarms began to blare, and the lieutenant assigned to that station leaned forward in his seat.

"What the-" He began

But Adam missed the rest as another wave of cold anxiety washed through hi. It was an incredibly powerful sensation, more than he had ever experienced in aggregate. It was crippling,, debilitating, and it was to his own surprise that he found himself on the floor hands clutching at his head as the feeling came towards him in waves,

"Architect." Someone said

And then Adam's mind was filled with.... Images.

Images from all angles and directions. He saw the geometrical pillars up close, glittering with starlight. He saw them from above and underneath and close up and far away. He saw the Empyrean as a small and brightly lit silhouette in the darkness, he saw it from above and to the sides and in a thousand other different angles. It was like seeing everything everywhere at once until it all began to focus on the empyrean growing closer, and closer and closer.

He could see the ship now, each and every line of her sleek body.

Each and every window.

And then

He could see INTO the windows, saw himself kneeling, and then-"

It was like a wall came down around him, and his thoughts were filled with a familiar presence, both soothing and immediately annoying.

"Come now Admiral, you might want to see this with your own eyes." Conn sounded bored, but somehow he could sense a sort of unnerved uneasiness coming from the Starborn's thoughts. And then he opened his eyes, his own eyes.

He didn't know how long that had taken, but he was sitting on the floor and lord Celex was kneeling next to him. He followed the other man's gaze towards the viewing window, his mind still shielded by Conn and-

"Shit."

Adam could no longer see the view of the stars or the apparatus, but what he saw instead was a cluster of a thousand coal black eyes staring down at him from moon faces and pale white skin. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands all pressed up against the windows, their hands pressing against the glass, their near featureless faces and eyes glued on the group of them through the glass from where they clustered en mass.

Adam had to resist the urge to back away as the starborn swarmed over the window.

"What is this?" Adam said softly

Lord Celex gripped his shoulder and nodded upwards to where Conn was floating near the command platform staring out the glass. His long trailing ribbons flowed out from his back and billowed in the air. He seemed odd and detached from the other starborn, and their naked alabaster bodies jammed against the glass.

In his ight grey suit he was almost as alien to them as they were to Adam.

A filter opened somewhere in the wall in Adam's mind and he could feel the conversation that went on through conn's head as if he was being separated from It by a thick pane of glass.

The conversation did not take place with words so mochas images and feelings and thoughts. It felt lik he shouldn't be able to understand it, but it was probably the easiest form of communication he had ever experienced. The ideas were so crip, the nuance clearly visible. Every intention was clear, and every moment logical.

The conversation went something like.

"How do you know that word." Referring to Deus

He sort of knew the answer, and he sort of didn't. Adam's head was filled with Conn's knowledge and memories, which was both shocking and new since Conn actively worked to keep his past and his thoughts a secret. Every Starborn knew what Deus was, Deus and all the other ranks of makers. It was an innate knowledge that culd be gleaned from the very deepest reaches of the mind. Adam was deus and that was something they could easily identify. In a way the starborn understood that they and he were somehow related and that both surprised, confused and scared them.

He could feel all this rushing through his head as he listened, and any manner of structured conversation devolved into feelings and memories communicated all at once.

In no specific order, the questions could be broken down into. What is this place? Who are you, why are you here? This is who I am? This is why we are here? Void?

They seemed almost surprised that Conn didn't know up until the moment they learned he had been orphaned at an early age ad left shortly after a new queen was born leaving him woefully unknowledgeable about his own species. This was a Starborn super nest that served as a sort of migration location. The superstructure was edible to them, and all groups of starborn came to these locations on occasion. Had he stayed longer he might have experienced it, but there were more of them there than usual.

As Adam sat, he felt a cold dread wash over him,

They were being hunted.

The darkborn.

He didn't have to ask receiving hundreds of images in quick succession of shapes that were eerily familiar. A long time ago when Kazna was still imprisoned for her crimes, Adam and the others had run across infected starborn. The action of the infection was never discovered, and they had not experienced such an event since, but inside their heads and their memories Adam recognized the infected starborn with their charred skin and their frayed ribbons.

The void.

They had been involved with everything, far longer than Adam could even have imagined. Hunting Deus.

And there the void had found them, hiding inside the bodies of constructs.

The revelation was both horrifying, and deeply troubling, a sentiment that was shared by the starborn who, in a matter of minutes had acquired all the knew knowledge Conn could provide, even plucking some memories from Adam's head as supplement. In mere moments they learned the meaning of Deus, the existence of Revelation and the architect, and the conflict with the void.

Adam's memory was filled with red mist, with the bone growths and then with the death of Conn's entire starborn colony discovered within the corrupted Polaris axis.

They knew and understood.

More voices rose up as other humans ran onto the bridge recoiling at the sight of a thousand black eyes staring at them from the cluster at the viewscreen.

And then

Conn was not able to protect him from the one sentiment that washed through all of them like a rolling wave.

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