The Beast Knows its Fate
Sequencing: Anachronic
Cognitive Insights: Disabled
Primary Entities: Unnamed | Ma’zu
Wandering Entities: None detected
Verification Status: Confirmed
The submitted reports had started calmly and followed the usual protocol of incidents collected and studied by the Pharon Survey in Soulsmire Core. The organization’s primary mandate was to respond to incidents that arose in the nodes outside the Core—specifically when those incidents bore the marks of Nyxborn phenomena.
The initial alerts from Nethra had been no different— cataloged as ‘Anomalous Signal: Under Study by Local Authorities.’ The Survey had filed it away as a low priority among the continuous stream of reports from nodes scattered across and beyond the Central Regions.
But then more messages arrived, separated by extended periods of silence, which at first didn’t raise immediate alarm. The long nights on the Terminus often severed communication with distant nodes. In those later reports from Nethra, the formal tone eroded, replaced by a growing sense of hysteria.
Fragments of the elder’s reports emerged in broken chronology, recounting a beast that had infiltrated the settlement, prowling its streets, murdering inhabitants, and leaving mutilated bodies in its wake. The reports escalated—until they stopped altogether.
The Pharon Registrar, the final arbiter of such matters within the Survey, ultimately elevated Nethra to ‘Critical: In Need of Investigation.’ Hypotheses were floated during the debriefs—some spoke of a wandering viromaton, while others speculated a dissident faction that had imploded into chaos. None of the theories felt certain. There were no clear images, no pictographic records to solidify the claims. It remained, in the end, a mystery—a codified unknown that the authorities at Soulsmire Core could only guess at from a distance.
It was this uncertainty that had finally prompted the Registrar, under direct orders from the Willing Jury itself, to dispatch the archaeologist to the node. There had been whispers of sending an entire excisionary unit, but in the end, they deemed that for Nethra, a single archaeologist would suffice.
The archaeologist came to see the end of Nethra. Many of its inhabitants were still alive but none too far from death, in the way the mind unravels when life itself becomes a curse. The skies above were bruised, torn by storms that had only been half-contained by the failing dome, starved of the energy it so desperately needed to protect the node settlement from what loomed outside its gates.
The stench of rot permeated the air, and in the streets, he saw them—half-dressed figures in the dust, laughing, weeping, copulating like animals. The few who still had enough presence to notice his arrival eyed him with hollow eyes, too far gone to care about the stranger in their midst.
Some of them stared upward with bent necks. Those hollow eyes looked skyward. Wisps of shadow circled above, dark and strange, passing through the once impenetrable barrier. The wind began to pick up, swirling dust through the streets, but the shapes above drifted slowly, seemingly following their own currents, unaffected by the gusts below. The dome trembled. What had started as faint pulses now faltered visibly.
He pulled his breathing mask tighter and inspected the outskirts. The node was supposed to be functional—a small, stable settlement on the fringes of the Central Region. It never undertook any major development projects—just a small place of life carved out from the Nyx. It was a place remembered in the archives for few relevant things. Among them, one stood out: a battle that had torn through Nethra hundreds of cycles ago, back when different governments held sway in the Central Regions, in a world far removed from what it has since become.
Dusk bled heavily into the streets. The remaining ruins drank in the last of the fading light. The long night was approaching. He had little time before the darkness settled in for its stretch. Either way, he was prepared to spend the resetstorm in Nethra and begin his journey back to the Core after dawn.
His mechanical hound growled low beside him and heaved forward. Its frame was all metal and force. The rider was more than used to the calibrated sway, the constant shifts as the beast of burden adjusted to rocksand dips in the terrain. But now, as they hit the main dirt artery, the sway steadied.
The administrative headquarters were located at the heart of the node. It took him longer than he liked to find it. The building was a stark block of concrete, more imposing than the rusted wrecks he had passed. It had two floors, and a tower extended to the height of a third.
It was without ornament, cold slabs stacked like a monument that had always been there.
He didn’t knock on the gate. There was no door left, just a gaping hole in the frame that once supported a sliding mechanism. The entrance led straight into a dark hall, scattered with debris.
He dismounted from the hound, which immediately rose to full height. Its sensors clicked into guarding mode. He detached one of the packs strapped to its side, secured it to his own body, and advanced towards the entrance without looking back.
The interior was chaos—a mess of overturned metal furniture and shattered walls. These had once been the offices of Nethra’s administration, now broken and abandoned, their desks upended, and terminals smashed. Dust coated everything.
Behind one cluttered desk, a single photograph still clung to the wall—cracked glass framing a smiling human male holding a child. That familiar rush hit him, the way it always did when pieces started to fall into place.
He recognized the man in the photograph as his contact, the node’s elder, the one who had petitioned the Survey.
A cough startled him. He turned, hand instinctively reaching for his sidearm, but it was only a haggardly woman, thin and withered from age, her fur matted and patchy. She entered the office room from the dark hallways and blinked at him with large, tired eyes, not afraid, just empty. “They’re all gone,” she rasped.
“And the elder? Is he still here?” he asked, pointing toward the photograph on the wall.
The woman shrugged, like a tired branch bending under weight. “Took the children. He didn’t want them to see all this. They thought they’d escape the beast if they left the node.”
They both fell silent for a moment.
“There’s an empty room upstairs,” she said in a flat voice. “It’s quiet now… mostly.” She offered, staring past him with a strange, detached calm, “Just don’t wander outside. That’s where the beast picks.”
He wasn’t sure if he would shelter here, but he knew he needed a base of operations. As he climbed the stairs, his mind worked through the situation. The node had deteriorated far more than he had anticipated—its decay seeped deeper than the reports had conveyed. He might need to stay here longer than expected. The night was closing in, and once it fell, the investigation would become harder.
The smell hit him halfway up the stairs—the sickly-sweet stench of death. When he reached the room, the source became clear. The elder hadn’t run far. His body hung from a beam, swollen, the rope cutting deep into his neck. It wasn’t the children he had spared from the horror—it was himself
The archaeologist didn’t flinch. Death was common in the far-flung nodes of the Nyx. Still, it stung—this man, so close to his investigation, had slipped away.
*
*
*
The archaeologist pitched his tent on the outskirts of the node, beneath a jagged outcrop of rock. He hammered carbon stakes into the dirt. The thick material flexed as he pulled it tight. He retreated within. From inside, he could hear the rhythmic steps of the mechanical hound patrolling the perimeter.
He sat propped up in his sleeping pod and looked through the reinforced clear panel at the front of the tent. The sky beyond was dark and fractured. The distant wails from the settlement reached him. Laughter? Cries? Screams? The sounds of madness. In the distance, faint green flames flickered, shifting like living things. They were burning copper—anything for fuel and warmth.
He woke with a start after a few hours of restless sleep. The hound had gone silent. Outside his tent, a body lay crumpled in the dirt—a stranger, throat torn rough and jagged. The hound stood guard, blood dripping from its fangs. Without a second thought, the archaeologist motioned for the machine to haul the body away. It was becoming routine now. He squeezed back inside the sleeping pod.
*
*
*
The alarm blared inside, dragging him from a restless sleep. Disoriented, he glanced outside—the last pale light of the Doomed Star had slipped behind the event horizon, leaving only the dark. The long night had arrived, carried on violent winds.
The archaeologist tapped his wrist control, and the tent’s seal hissed open. Squeezing through, he switched on the floodlight in his chest harness. Light pierced the black, illuminating the storm of dust that swirled and eddied in the thick, choking air. He stepped away from the camp. The ground crunched beneath his boots.
He moved toward where the body had been hauled. The memory of his sudden awakening and the mutilated throat of the intruder flashed briefly through his synapses. As he reached the spot behind the camp, he frowned. The corpse was gone. Only a smear of blood remained in the dirt.
As he scanned the ground, something caught his eye—a thin, iridescent filament, almost invisible in the floodlight’s beam. It shimmered faintly, stretching from the bloodstained dirt into the darkness, like a living thread drawn tight. He crouched down, reaching out carefully to touch it. His fingers recoiled slightly at the texture—wet, but not with blood. It felt slick, almost gelatinous, but strong
He followed the strand of filament, threading it through his fingers, leading deeper into the darkness, tugging toward its source. As he moved, he noticed more threads
branching off, forming a web that wove through the ground.
Then he saw what the thread was leading to—a deep, wide hole in the earth, as if something giant had scooped out a chunk of the ground. At the bottom, the threads connected to an object that let out a sharp buzzing noise—a nest, a tangle of buzzing, shifting shapes like insects, swarming in frantic patterns. Before he could react, the spectacle vaporized, dissolving into thin air, and the filament in his hand disintegrated along with it, vanishing like smoke.
He stood there for a moment, then motioned to the hound. The mechanical creature obeyed instantly, descending into the pit. While the hound scanned the bottom of the cavity, the man turned his attention to the surrounding area.
He found a trail—the remains of torn clothes, a shredded backpack with its contents strewn across the dirt. It looked like something had ripped through it with force. As he sifted through the scattered items, his fingers brushed against a cracked datapad, barely intact. He lifted it, turning it over in his hands, then glanced back at the hole in the ground, waiting for the hound to finish its survey and return.
The archaeologist wiped off the device and handed it to the hound. Without a word, the machine began its work, slicing into the datapad’s vault. The archaeologist waited, warily scanning the darkness around him. A faint click from the hound signaled that the process was complete.
He pulled a thin cable from his harness-strapped microcomputer and plugged it into the input slot behind the hound’s head. The connection blinked to life, and a small screen on his wrist illuminated, displaying the interface. Lines of translated text unraveled as the system decrypted the datapad’s contents.
* * *
“I’m looking for one named Ma’zu,” the archaeologist demanded in a harsh tone.
The woman’s eyes widened, and without a word, she turned and fled into the chaos outside. But someone else stepped forward—a young child, no older than ten, her face streaked with dirt and tears.
“Ma’zu lives at the edge of town,” she whispered, pointing in the direction where the Doomed Star had earlier plunged behind the veil of night.
The archaeologist didn’t wait for more. He turned and headed for the edge of the node with a rifle in his grip. On the way, he saw two emaciated figures wrestling in the dirt. He didn’t hesitate. Two shots, and they both fell. There were no words exchanged. The fever of this place was getting into him.
Ma’zu’s workshop was a relic from another time, a simple structure hidden away from the rest of the node. The door creaked as he pushed it open. Inside, Ma’zu, an old Er’ax shellwright, looked up from her workbench. The cobalt blue of her skin was thick and plated, but a fine seam along her temple twitched repeatedly. A halo of insectlike shapes circled above her hunched back.
A buzzing sound crawled through the workshop.
“I was expecting you,” she said, steadying her voice. “You’re late.”
The archaeologist didn’t respond immediately. He scanned the room, noting the packed bags in the corner, the hurried preparation. “You’re leaving?”
Ma’zu nodded. “The node’s done. Everyone’s gone. I’m leaving before the end comes.” She gripped a worn tool, knuckles pale, as if it was the only solid thing left in her crumbling world.
“What about the artifact?” he pressed.
The shellwright’s expression darkened. “It’s gone… it’s too late now. No one’s getting it back.”
The archaeologist clenched his jaw. “What happened here? What have you done?”
After a pause, Ma’zu sighed. “The beast won. We tried everything. It didn’t matter.”
“Tell me exactly what happened when you went looking for the signal source.”
“We summoned it,” Ma’zu whispered, her voice breaking. “It’s my fault. That artifact… It clings to people. I should’ve waited. I should’ve waited for you to come.”
“Explain.”
Ma’zu’s words tumbled out in a frantic rush. The paraphrator device translated her words with delay. “We were asked to find the source of the signal. We searched all over the node, but it kept escaping from us. Then the scouts began acting strange. Paranoid. Arguing over things, fighting. They were locked up. After two arcs, we finally found the source—we calculated that it must be hiding underground. So we started drilling.”
She shuddered. “The first time we saw it, it was… it was like nothing we’d ever seen. An object that buzzed, tangled, and writhed. We photographed it, but when we tried to view the footage, the data turned out null. We couldn’t leave it there. We were afraid of it. So we kept looking until we could extract it. When we finally pulled it out of the hole…”
Her tone dropped, and she waved her hand through the buzzing forms hovering around her head. “That’s when we heard it. A voice… a warning. It didn’t need a paraphrator—everyone heard it, clear as anything. ‘Leave it and forget it.’ It repeated, over and over. But we didn’t listen. We took it back to the elder. We gave it to him. I should’ve known. After this, the beast arrived.”
“You haven’t awakened any beasts,” the archaeologist said slowly, the pieces clicking into place. “You found a cortex hive.”
The archaeologist didn’t think twice. The Pharon Survey demanded strict adherence to protocol. His gun was drawn, leveled, and aimed.
“I’ll leave Nethra. You will never see me again.”
The archaeologist tightened his grip on the weapon. The questions came rapidly, fired off with an intensity that left no room for answers. “How did no one stop the drillers? How long has this node survived with a cortex hive so close to the surface?” He stepped closer, towering over Ma’zu, who had backed herself against the wall.
He continued his questioning. “Hives manifest in places that have witnessed events the station refuses to forget. They survive reset storms but are never found inside node perimeters,” the urgency in his voice mounting. “It must have been dragged from beyond the gates. Who did it? What information does the cortex store? Where—”
Then he asked the last question.
“Where is the hive now?”
Ma’zu was locked in place, back against the wall. Her breath thinned and her throat constricted, the words stuck somewhere deep, unable to surface.
“I don’t know.”
The archaeologist placed his finger on the trigger. He knew that the rest would be nothing but pleading. The cortex hive should never have been touched. There was no beast that terrorized the node—it was the hive itself that corrupted the minds of the inhabitants. The residents had been trapped in a nightmare of their own making. But Ma’zu’s mistake went deeper—she was a shellwright, she should have stopped this.
The purging of the node would start here.
He pulled the trigger and the gun fired. Ma’zu’s body crumpled to the floor, her breath finally escaping from her throat in a soft, broken wheeze. The shapes that flew above her blinked out of existence, as if they had never been there at all.
The door of the workshop creaked open. The mechanical hound lumbered inside, alerted by the sound of firing. The metal limbs clicked on the workshop floor.
As she lay there in the corner, Ma’zu’s gaze snapped to the hound the moment it entered. Her chest heaved. A slow, cold understanding settled in her stare. Her face trembled, and in a broken, ragged whisper, she uttered her last words. “The beast. We knew it would come.”
The archaeologist’s expression didn’t waver. He had already cut off the paraphrator. Without a word, he turned and climbed onto the hound’s saddle, his back to Ma’zu as she let out the last breath of life. Whatever she had tried to say was swallowed by the hum of the engine as it carried him into the dark to finish what had been set in motion.
