03 - Aeon's Necropolis

Our engines run low… All signals, now dark… If the Wraiths still track us, then silence is our survival. Dread swells as the view opens… What we thought were shimmering stars degrade into oceans of timeworn wreckage. Ships…Endless ships… Our scanners struggle with the density… The mass alone rivals that of a planet... Shattered hulls in drifting orbits, Fragments twisting without end. Ships in shapes we've never seen, Silent frames that never mend. Ancient metal, scarred and hollow, Shifting dead open new corridors, Layered deep into countless paths, …Echoes of forgotten wars, Frames collapsed under pressure, Slashes piercing steelbound hearts. Wounds sparking twisted patterns, Decks to engines, just scraps and parts, Burn marks etched in drifting metal, Damage appears as if space had broken Grave upon grave in drifting circles, Tomb upon tomb of ages unspoken. Every vector bends and trembles, Every scan shows no star trails, Our ship strains against the currents, Every escape route plotted fails This is not a storm, not a planet, Not a field of drifting stone, All this wreckage moves together, As if breathing on its own. Something here, it draws them in, The gravity will not let them go, We see death in every direction, In every path we dare to follow. ___ Radar pings, just in range... Metal scraping unseen wrecks... Fragments strike our hull in passing… Something slips beyond our scanners… The field of ships shifts with it. We slip by to avoid being prey… Low harmonic tones across the band… We filter only resonance. Breath without a body… Sound without a source… Data echoes long unheard, Ancient charts of unknown zones… Memories beyond our histories … Fragmented images, a forgotten past. Sec-Sec-Sector class… unknown-own-own… Con-Con-Containment break… warning… N-N-N-Navigation un-un-unreliable… Re-re-re-return path not advised… Be-be-beacons in-in-in the Gas Cloud, Procee-ee-eed at your own risk… We pass towers split and hollow, Stations cracked along their spine, Gun arrays still locked in silence, Frozen mid-defense in time. No war could have caused this… Every fleet now dead, just spin, Where ancient threats stalk and prowl… Where only ships are drawn within. Contact spike. Target sweep. Power flickers through the grid. Dead systems now alive, Our path forward, they will forbid. Shields flare hard against the darkness, Warning tones begin to cry, This graveyard still defends its borders… …Even now it will not die. Pressure crawling through the framework, Metal groaning deep and low, All these wrecks are locked together, Held by force in vertigo. Continuous, this graveyard’s spiral, Endless mass drives its spin, Not a storm and not a current… Devouring everything within. We are not just flying through this, We are caught inside the weight, Every burst draws us slightly inward, Every correction comes too late. Nothing here obeys reality… Nothing should act with such disarray… We can’t die in this graveyard… There has to be another way!! Are we being dragged in deeper? Is this graveyard an ensnaring sea? We are the Outerrunner! We'll find a way, we'll break free! Coordinates flash across our screens, A signal with no known design, A path that leads beyond the wreckage, No time to think, throttled to the red-line. We break through the iron curtains. The path behind now disappeared, Ahead, a cloud of shifting prisms, In patterns and colors that look engineered. Ruins and wreckage fade inside, Stars distort within the haze, Light refracts, our minds reel, With no way back, We enter this neon maze…