[Two weeks aboard. Avyanna is learning to eat without permission. Learning to sleep without her boots on. Learning the shape of a life that doesn’t hurt.]
[The shard is learning too.]
[It starts with heat.]
[Not fever—something sharper. Localized. A warmth that blooms at the base of her skull and radiates down her spine like spreading honey.]
[Avyanna pauses mid-step in the corridor. Back to the bulkhead without thinking.]
[Two exits. One blind corner. One camera dome she still can’t stop looking for, even when there’s nothing there.]
[She presses two fingers to the base of her skull, as if she can pin the sensation down.]
[Waits. The heat fades.]
(Nothing. Just… adjustment. The body adapting.)
[She keeps walking. Doesn’t mention it to anyone.]
[Medical bay. Nyx’s domain-cluttered with equipment, crystals, and datapads covered in handwriting that looks like equations had a fight with poetry.]
[Avyanna sits on the examination table. The scanner hums around her—not the cold, indifferent hum of the Kennel’s medical station, but something warmer. More attentive.]
[She keeps her hands flat on her thighs. Palms down. Like that will keep her from shaking.]
[Her eyes keep drifting to the door. Not fear exactly. Logistics. If it opens, she wants to be facing it.]
Nyx: [still watching the readouts] If you want me to stop the scan, say so. No penalty. No explaining required.
Avyanna: [after a beat] Don’t stop.
Nyx: [studying readouts, brow furrowed] The markings on your spine—we knew they were connected to the shard. What we didn’t know was how deep the connection goes.
Avyanna: [carefully] How deep does it go?
Nyx: [a pause] Cellular.
[The word hangs in the air.]
Avyanna: What does that mean?
Nyx: [turning to face her] The shard isn’t just embedded in you. It’s integrated. Bonded at a level we can’t surgically address. It’s become part of your nervous system.
[Avyanna’s hands grip the edge of the table. The Kennel taught her what “permanent” meant. It meant trapped. It meant no escape.]
Avyanna: [voice thin] Can you remove it?
Nyx: [honest, gentle] No. Not without killing you. And honestly, at this point, I’m not sure where you end and it begins.
[Silence. The scanner continues its quiet work.]
Avyanna: [barely audible] Is it going to kill me?
Nyx: [considering, then] I don’t think so. The integration is stable. Your vitals are actually improving—better than when we first scanned you. It’s not attacking you.
Avyanna: Then what is it doing?
Nyx: [a small smile, something like wonder] I think it chose you.
[The words don’t make sense. Things don’t choose in the Kennel. Things are assigned, allocated, extracted.]
Avyanna: Things don’t choose.
Nyx: [mild] Shards do. This one, at least. It could have bonded with anyone who touched it—but it didn’t activate until you. It waited. And now it’s… settling in.
[Avyanna looks at her hands. Normal hands. Human hands. Nothing visible to suggest there’s something ancient living inside her.]
Nyx: [softer] This is unprecedented. I’ve studied Lattice phenomena for decades, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Whatever you’re carrying—it’s old. Pre-Synthetic, maybe-older than the protocols most people use without thinking. And it seems to want to be here.
[That night, she dreams.]
[Not the nightmares of the Kennel—the extraction warnings, the shift-change sirens, the faces of workers who didn’t wake up. Something else.]
[Geometric patterns. Crystalline structures that fold in on themselves, impossibly complex. A hum that might be a voice if she could just hear it properly.]
[Not words. A tone shift. Like the hum changes shape when she thinks certain thoughts.]
[Heat that isn’t comfort so much as presence. Attention without hands.]
[She wakes gasping, but not afraid. The presence behind her eyes pulses once—a brief rise in temperature, then neutral—and settles back into silence.]
(You’re there. You’ve always been there. Since the rock.)
[No answer. Just patience. Just waiting.]
[Over the next days, it stops feeling random.]
[Heat, yes—but not always. Sometimes the sensation is a brief cooling, like something withdrawing its attention. Sometimes it’s pressure behind her eyes, gentle until it isn’t, like a hand held up: stop.]
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
[The patterns start to organize. Not readable, but repeatable. Shapes that return in the same order, the way a hallway returns in your dreams.]
[And the hum has moods. Flat when she’s exhausted. Sharper when she’s afraid. Almost curious when she lets herself notice the ship’s kindness without immediately looking for the hook.]
(Temperature. Pressure. Pattern. Tone.)
(If she were logging it, that’s what she’d write.)
[She tests it without meaning to.]
[When she lies-small, easy lies, the ones that kept her alive-heat blooms and then cools fast, like a correction.]
[Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe she just wants it to be a responder instead of a symptom.]
[When she thinks, very carefully, about running-about finding an exit she can control—the pressure spikes behind her eyes until she sits down and breathes and lets the thought go.]
[She can’t prove correlation is anything but correlation. But she knows the sensations change when her choices change.]
[She hides it.]
[Of course she hides it. The Kennel taught her that weakness is leverage. That anything unusual about you becomes a resource for someone else to exploit.]
(If I’m broken, they might send me back.)
[She knows it’s not rational. They’ve adopted her. Given her a name. But the Kennel’s logic runs deep, and trust is still a foreign language.]
[So when Rho asks how she’s feeling, she says “fine.”]
[When Vesper notices she’s distracted, she says “just tired.”]
[When Elia’s gaze lingers a moment too long, she looks away and pretends there’s nothing to see.]
[She also starts choosing seats with her back to a wall. Starts keeping one hand wrapped around a mug at all times, like it can anchor her. Starts wiping her palms on her pants before anyone can notice they’re damp.]
[Inventory. Cargo bay. The familiar work of counting and cataloging—something her hands can do while her mind wrestles with the thing in her spine.]
[A heat flare. Stronger than usual. She sways, catches herself on a crate.]
(Not now. Please not now.)
[The geometric patterns bloom across her vision-fractals, lattices, structures that feel like they’re trying to tell her something. The pressure builds behind her eyes.]
[The overhead lights stutter once. Less than a heartbeat, but enough to make her stomach drop.]
[Her tablet chirps with a system alert. She slaps it silent without looking.]
[She closes them. Breathes. Waits for it to pass.]
[When she opens them, Bubbles is there.]
[The drone hovers at the edge of the aisle—not close enough to intrude, close enough to respond. Scarred metal, purposeful presence. She doesn’t remember hearing it approach.]
Bubbles: [quiet, through the speaker] You don’t have to tell anyone right now.
[Avyanna freezes. Caught.]
Bubbles: But I’m here.
[Not a demand. Not a report. Just presence. Just witness.]
Avyanna: [after a long moment] You saw.
Bubbles: I see a lot of things. [beat] I don’t always report them.
Avyanna: [confused] Why?
Bubbles: [the drone shifts slightly, something almost like a shrug] Because sometimes people need time to figure out what they’re experiencing before they have to explain it.
[Avyanna stares at the scarred drone. In the Kennel, being observed meant being documented. Being documented meant being controlled.]
Bubbles: [gentler] The thing in you—it’s not hurting you, is it?
Avyanna: [automatic] I’m fine.
[The word comes out before she can stop it.]
Avyanna: [lower] It doesn’t hurt. I don’t think. It just… makes me dizzy sometimes.
Bubbles: And you’re not ready to talk about it.
[A statement, not a question. Avyanna nods.]
Bubbles: Then we wait. [beat] When you’re ready, I’ll be here. So will Nyx. So will everyone else.
[The drone doesn’t move away. Just hovers, patient, present.]
[Avyanna returns to her inventory. Hands moving, mind elsewhere.]
(You trust the AI more than the humans. Why?)
[She knows why. The AI doesn’t want anything from her. Bubbles isn’t calculating her value, measuring her utility, deciding whether she’s worth keeping. Bubbles is just… there. Present without demands.]
[The humans are kind. Genuinely kind—she’s starting to believe that. But kindness from humans has always come with invisible strings. The Kennel taught her to look for them.]
[The AIs don’t have strings. They have protocols, and the protocols are transparent.]
(Is that the lesson? Trust the systems you can see?)
[The presence behind her eyes stirs. Something that might be agreement. Something that might be encouragement.]
(You’re watching me learn. You’re waiting for something.)
[A small rise in temperature at the base of her skull. Not an answer—but not nothing, either.]
[Late night. Her quarters. The viewport filled with stars.]
[Avyanna lies in bed—still in her clothes, but boots off now, a compromise with safety—and stares at the ceiling.]
[The geometric patterns flicker at the edge of her vision. Familiar now. Almost comforting.]
(What are you trying to tell me?)
[No words. But something shifts in the patterns—a sense of reaching, of trying to communicate across a gap that hasn’t quite closed yet.]
(You can hear me. Can’t you?)
[Heat. Then steadier pressure, like a hand bracing a door. Patience without language.]
(But you can’t talk back. Not yet.)
[The hum shifts tone. Not louder, just… edged. The patterns intensify briefly, then fade.]
[The bedside light flickers once, then steadies.]
(You’re trapped too. In a different way. Trying to get out. Trying to connect.)
[The presence settles. Content with being understood, even partially.]
[Avyanna closes her eyes. The patterns persist behind her eyelids-beautiful, incomprehensible, waiting.]
(I don’t know what you are. I don’t know what you want.)
(But you chose me. That has to mean something.)
[Sleep comes eventually. The presence watches, patient as stone, ancient as stars.]
[Somewhere in the ship’s systems, Bubbles logs a quiet note:]
Starforge Canticles, a follow/favorite (and rating) helps a lot.
https://linktr.ee/cessnyalin
Floors, not thrones.