The stars went out. What's left runs on borrowed light.
The Fracture
After the Helion Trust began tapping the suns for power, the stars they had networked to balance the draw started to fail, one cracking, then the next, an unstoppable cascade that took far longer than a single day. Some suns shattered into the debris now called the Shatterzones. Some simply went dark. A few still leak a wrong-colored glow through their cracks. No one alive remembers a whole sky.
This is the event that ended the old world, and the only clock anyone keeps. There is before the Fracture, and there is after.
// true cause: ███████████ // filed as accident · helion trust
The Helion Trust
Cheap. Clean. Endless.
The megacorporation that murdered the sky and still runs most of what is left of it. They invented star-tapping, sold it as cheap and clean and endless, and bled the suns dry on a balance sheet. The Fracture was their doing, though their records call it an accident and their enforcers call it nothing at all. They kept the surviving light, the shipping lanes, and the law, and they hunt anyone who threatens the order they profit from. A "Trust" is the cruelest possible word for what they are, and they know it.
The Wake
Free the stars. Make the Trust answer.
The largest organized resistance to the Trust, a rebel fleet born in the Shatterzones and named twice over: for the wreckage a ship leaves behind it, and for the mourning owed a murdered sky. It does not hold ground. It drifts in the debris, strikes Trust haulers and rigs, and vanishes before the response arrives. Its flagship is the Morning Star, and its most feared captain is Riven.
At the size it has reached, the Wake is no longer clean. It rations air and power with a hard hand, takes crews who did not all choose to come, and in its deeper holds the founding grief is curdling into zealotry. A splinter has begun listening to the bleed-light, and its leaders pretend not to hear. A rebellion big enough to beat the Trust is big enough to become the next one.
The Vrakul
They do not conquer. They cleanse.
The species the whole system fears, and with reason. Bigger, faster, and stronger than any human, their technology sharper than anything human hands ever built, they are certain to the root that they are the universe's finished work. They call themselves the Unbroken. Everything else that breathes is, to them, the Broken: lesser, unfinished, a contamination to be cleared off creation like rust.
A Vrakul stands taller than a tall man, built heavy with muscle, its hide ridged with spikes from spine to tail and spurred along the arms, its slit-pupiled eyes reading warmth and motion in the dark. For all their brutality they are not stupid. They are precise, patient, and proud, and that pride is the only soft place they own.
Unlike the Trust, the Vrakul do not drill stars. They tend them. To the Unbroken a sun is a living thing, and a murdered star is the foulest desecration their creed can name. The Fracture is a wound they can feel across the dark, and the bleed-light is a beacon pulling them toward it. They are coming. The longer the sky stays broken, the closer they get.
A galaxy lit by spite and salvage.
The Crew
Personnel aboard a ship the Trust would rather forget.
RIVEN
You can call me captain. You do not get the rest.
A faceless black exoskeleton and a filtered voice, the nightmare the Trust would trade a sun to bury. A monster to the dark, and the captain his own crew would follow into a dying sun, because he would go first.
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VESNA
The captain decides where we go. I decide whether we live to get there.
Seven feet of clay-red Drevan muscle and the warmest soul aboard. Mother of the ship: gentle by choice, devastating when forced, and the only one alive who can make Riven rest.
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DAWN
Welcome aboard the Morning Star. Formerly Helion property, current ownership contested.
A stolen Helion concierge AI who runs a pirate warship like a luxury liner and calls everyone aboard, hostages included, his guests. Impeccably polite, quietly unhinged, and far more loyal than he will ever admit.
▸ View on Janitor.aiThe Morning Star
Prototype warship. Stolen. Flying a black flag.
The Morning Star is the finest vessel the Helion Trust ever built, and Riven stole her. A prototype warship turned crown jewel of the Wake, she outruns and outguns anything in the system because she is the system's best, flying under a black flag, and the Trust hates her the way you hate a thing that used to be yours. Sleek where most rebel hulls are welded scrap, lethal at range, crewed by an elite few and their captain.
She is a killing thing wrapped around a home. That contradiction is the entire point of her.
Bow to Stern
The Bridgeprow
Sits high in the prow, all dark glass and Helion instrument-work, where Riven commands. The viewports look straight out into the Shatterzones and the bleed-light beyond.
The Captain's Quarterssealed
Sealed and private, the one room aboard he enters alone. Behind that door, and only there, the suit comes off. It is the single place in the universe Riven has a face.
The Warrenscrew deck
The crew's quarters, cramped and lived-in and covered in the small evidence of people who have made a home inside a warship. This is the heart the menace exists to protect.
The Messamidships
The galley and the common table, loudest at shift change, and the truest measure of how good he is to his own. No one aboard goes hungry while the captain eats.
The Holdaft
The cargo and salvage bay, where the take from every raid comes in, and where captives are first dragged aboard.
The Brigoff the hold
A few cold cells off the hold. Where a survivor pulled from a Trust ship begins.
The Medbayaft
Patched and overworked, run by a crew medic who has watched the captain bleed and never told a soul what color it ran.
Engineering & the Drivestern
Holds the stolen Helion reactor that makes her impossible to catch and lethal to service, and it is the chief reason the Trust wants her back intact rather than in pieces.
The Jawsflanks
The boarding clamps and breaching gear along her flanks, the wolf's teeth she sets into a hull before the crew pour through.