Scene
As the Aetherion dropped from its jump. Nyra swelled in the view-screen, stark and strange in its eternal bondage. One half blazed under Nyros’s merciless light, a wasteland of molten rock and glassy plains where no ocean had endured for eons. The other lay buried in silence, mountains of black ice locked in shadow. Between them stretched a narrow band of twilight—an endless dusk, where warmth and cold met in fragile balance. There, perhaps, life might still cling.
As the Aetherion settled into orbit, something vast rose out of the dim horizon. Vear stepped closer, eyes narrowing.
A colossal structure hung in the sky, half-formed yet already immense. Its skeletal frame was tethered to a lattice of superstructure—girders and support beams stretching outward like veins of steel. Not a station. Not a city. The beginnings of a ship.
Scattered lights glimmered along its surface. Through the magnification filters, figures came into focus—men in suits crawling across the beams, their torches and welders spitting sparks into the void. They moved with steady purpose, dwarfed by the enormity of the vessel, but alive—survivors clinging to their work, refusing to surrender.
The scale of it struck Vear like a blow. The ship’s skeleton stretched for kilometers, its ribs arching outward into the emptiness, each beam a promise that one day it would rise whole. Even unfinished, its presence loomed—monument and tomb alike, forged of desperation. The workers seemed no more than specks against it, fragile and defiant, yet their sparks lit the dark like stars reborn.
The red light of Nyros bled across Vear’s features as he stood motionless before the view-screen. For a long moment he said nothing, as though the sight itself demanded silence.
Vear: At last his voice came, low and unsteady, carrying more awe than question. “They were building a vessel…” He drew a breath, eyes narrowing as the thought took shape. “…but to where?”
Aethra’s answer followed, quiet and inexorable: “The survivors of Edson resettled here, carrying fragments of memory, myth, and ruin. But their refuge is only temporary. In one hundred and fifty years, Nyros will sweep close to Aethera once more, and solar flares will scour this world clean. To endure, they build this vessel—a hope against the certainty of fire. It will take fifty years to complete…”
Aethra: She paused, her voice lowering, as though even the void should not hear. “…yet its destination remains unknown.”
The words lingered in the chamber, heavier than silence, as Vear stared at the sparks still blooming against the endless dark.
Visual & Story Beats
- Atmospheric lattice: Nyra was a tidally locked world—one half scorched by Nyros’s fire, the other frozen in endless night, with only a thin twilight ring where life could endure..
- Colossal vessel of hope: Above Nyra hung the beginnings of a colossal vessel, its skeletal frame tethered to lattices of steel, where scattered survivors toiled to forge a hope against the coming fire.
- Survivors : The survivors of Edson came to Nyra, bearing only memory, myth, and ruin—yet their refuge was but a pause, fragile as dusk before the night.