Location: Edge of the Oort Cloud – Deep Space Monitoring Array DSMA-14
Timestamp: 03:32:19 UMT | Automated Relay Triggered
The array hadn't pinged in 63 years.
Buried in a ghost orbit beyond the icy debris of the Oort Cloud, DSMA-14 was an automated relic—one of dozens scattered across the solar system's farthest edges. It had been built during the height of Atlas' expansion era, long before the fall of Grayson, and left to watch the stars.
Tonight, it watched something else.
A silent object, non-reflective, absorbing sensor sweeps. No transponder. No heat trail.
Moving toward the system with purpose. Fast.
It didn't ping back.
It never pinged back.
Instead, its presence set off dozens of dormant protocols—buried codes laced into old Atlas AI mesh, now reactivated.
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ONI High Orbital Watch Station – Luna
Director Eryn Halbek stood motionless as the signal replayed on the secure holotable. Three times. Then a fourth. Behind her, the room buzzed with quiet urgency.
"Trajectory is fixed. It's not natural. But it's not broadcasting. Could be Ceph. Could be something else."
Halbek's jaw tightened.
"Scramble deep-black assets. Re-task the Helldivers. I want every Enclave cell mapped, every Horizon node on alert, and someone get me Enclave."
"Rasch? We haven't confirmed if he's still—"
"Find him. If this thing is Ceph… we're going to need every card we've ever buried."
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Horizon Industries – Venus Terraforming Command
Elisabet Sobeck had just finished a systems review when the flagged message reached her.
"Object. Interstellar. Moving toward us. No communication. Non-reflective."
She stared at the data silently. Her VI, GAIA-lite, filtered the variables.
"Probability of Ceph origin: 42%. Probability of previously unknown lifeform: 37%. Remaining: Unknown technological origin."
She looked across the lush corridors of the Venus biodome, where life flourished after centuries of engineering. She whispered to herself:
"We were just beginning to heal."
She knew she wouldn't be able to stay silent. Not this time.
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Enclave Listening Post – Asteroid Cradle 909, Belt Region
The readout made Karl Rasch's stomach knot.
"They've found it. Or it's found us."
He turned to Hargreave's neural proxy, a flickering interface of the man who no longer walked.
"We should've sealed the vaults tighter."
The digital voice that answered him was distant, almost regretful.
"We never could seal the universe, Karl. We just delayed the inevitable."
The Enclave began routing power to every blacksite. It wasn't about staying hidden anymore. It was about surviving the impact.
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Sol Accord Deep Relay Node – Mars
"We have confirmation. It's real."
Dai Nyala paced the cold chamber. The signal analysis from the Accord's own covert receivers matched what ONI had intercepted. Her people were already trying to spin up contingency plans.
"If this sparks war again…"
A quiet voice, another Accord diplomat, answered her:
"Then peace dies before it ever had a chance to live."
But Dai wasn't ready to give up.
"Then we prepare. We speak to the radicals, the loyalists, Horizon, even the Enclave if we must. We either face this thing together… or we fall one at a time."
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Location: Tunguska, Siberia – June 30, 1908
Time: 07:14 AM, Local Time
The sky lit up with an unnatural brilliance. Forests blistered, trees flattened in waves that radiated for miles. But in the epicenter—it didn't burn. It hummed.
A shepherd named Pyotr Antonov stumbled across the blast zone days later, drawn by dreams. Night after night, they whispered. His wife begged him not to go. He went anyway.
There was a crater—but not a deep one. The Earth had split like it was breathing. In the center, buried beneath cracked layers of permafrost and obsidian slag, was a vein of light.
Pyotr touched it.
He didn't die.
He changed.
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Location: Orenburg Asylum – 1910
The man who called himself Pyotr no longer remembered his old life. His eyes glowed faintly under the lids. He never blinked. He never aged.
He sat in silence, drawing strange diagrams in the walls with fingernails. Symbols no one could read. Spirals within spirals. Eyes inside eyes.
Sometimes he'd whisper in tongues. One nurse claimed she saw her dead son behind his eyes. Another said he made her forget how to speak for a week.
The records stopped in 1912.
But not him.
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Location: Europe – 1930s–1945
The entity that had been Pyotr moved through the madness of war like a ghost. He advised an occultist circle in Vienna. Appeared in Nazi archives under the name "The Siberian Seer." After the war, he disappeared into the chaos of the Eastern Front.
His presence was noted only in margins. War journals. Insane scribbles.
A CIA debrief in 1964 references a "figure of impossible age" photographed near a Soviet Arctic listening post—unnaturally unblurred in a fast-moving shot.
The name Ash Vale appears for the first time in 1987, in a London biotech startup that quietly vanished.
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Location: Earth – Present Day (2220)
The operative now calling himself Halbek's "advisor" no longer wears faces. He copies them. Reconstructs them. He breathes civilization into decay. Gently guiding. Whispering in minds unprotected.
"You only need to nudge entropy," he once told a dead man, "and humanity will do the rest."
He fed the worst instincts. Greed. Fear. Paranoia. Pushing certain humans to the brink, allowing their own ambition to become the tools of extinction.
He does not serve.
He prepares.
For the signal from the stars that will come when the path is cleared.
"Soon," he murmurs, standing in Halbek's shadow, "they'll hear the Song of the Old Mind. And they'll kneel."
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Location: Earth – The Carpathian Mountains, 2220
Deep Subterranean Vault – "Blackroot Site"
He had worn many faces.
A Russian mystic. A German scientist. A colonial reformist. A philanthropist.
None of them were his true self.
Buried beneath rock and myth, It stirred in the twilight of old machines and humming bio-architecture. The air was alive with electric whispers—neural memories playing back in circuits not designed by human hands. Ceph psy-architecture, integrated into this place when man still thought war was fought with sticks and fire.
He stepped into the stasis mirror.
Skin: Human
Pulse: Human
Thoughts: Ceph
They had tried to kill him in 1908, when the Tunguska pod failed its timed transition. Instead, he survived the impact—barely—and went underground, bleeding psionic influence into the rising tide of humanity.
He was not built to conquer directly.
He was designed to prepare the soil.
To soften the species. Confuse. Agitate. Polarize. He had been doing it for centuries now.
His fingers danced across ancient Ceph controls built into the roots of the earth. They had been waiting for confirmation. For the signal. And now—the object from deep space was en route. They were coming.
His time in hiding was almost over.
----XXXX----
Please Drop some POWERSTONES.