dustedstarsfall

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Whistleblower Woes

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14

The holoscreen flickered to life as Dallum Ostraus entered the final authorization code. A soft chime marked the file as “CONFIDENTIAL – EIC INTERNAL CLEARANCE GRANTED.” The footage had been sealed until now, part of a sensitive investigation still under internal review. Only after weeks of political stabilization in Sector 8 had clearance been extended to Dallum.

Timestamp: Three months ago—the exact week Dallum was first assigned to the Icarus Nova case.

He didn’t dwell on the delay. The file had simply been above his pay grade. Now it was his responsibility to make sense of it.

He leaned forward, adjusting the audio sync as the footage loaded.

The camera caught a dim office interior—polished, minimalist, clean. A woman sat alone at a desk near the far wall. Dallum pulled her file up: Kella Marsten, personal secretary to Senator Gerrik Lang. No priors. No infractions. Her psych eval, logged shortly after the incident, described trauma-induced hypervigilance  and survivor's guilt.

Kella shifted in her chair, tapping nervously at a datapad. Her eyes kept flicking toward the clock, the door, the hallway—waiting for the night to end. She wasn’t supposed to be there. According to the statement, she'd been finalizing a report for internal migration records when everything changed.

A distant metallic hiss. She froze.

Then: footsteps.

She slid under her desk, trembling, camera angle slightly distorting her silhouette as her breath slowed to near silence.

Two figures entered moments later.

Senator Gerrik Lang strode in first—broad-shouldered, confident, businesslike even at this hour. Behind him, just a step slower, came a leaner form with violet hair and a loose, worn coat.

Dallum stiffened.

Nova.

Even with the grainy quality, the figure was unmistakable. He walked like he didn’t care who was watching. Eyes bright, movements loose, almost casual.

Lang poured himself a drink without looking back. “You’re late,” he muttered.

“Wasn’t on the calendar,” Nova replied, circling slowly. “I figured this was a drop-in sort of meeting. You know me. Never could resist a good midnight heart-to-heart.”

Lang gave a tired smile. “I suppose I should’ve expected it. You always did like your entrances dramatic.”

Nova chuckled. “And you always liked them clean.”

Nova moved to the edge of Lang’s desk, tracing a finger along a carved crystal sculpture—off-world, gaudy, unnecessary. He gave a low chuckle. “Still spending government stipends on dust rocks and light shows?”

Lang glanced up from his drink, unimpressed. “You’ve always had a peasant’s eye, Nova. Can’t tell mineral craftsmanship from bulk glass if it stabbed you.”

Nova grinned. “You’re right. I’ve never had much taste. Probably why this place gives me hives.”

Lang swirled the amber liquid in his glass, unconcerned. “You didn’t drop by to admire my décor. So what is it this time—credits? A job? Or just nostalgia for the days when you still had purpose?”

Nova shrugged. “You tell me. Last I checked, border skirmishes are quiet, Orzen’s gone to ground, and yet you’re still raking in more than peacetime should allow. Must be a hell of a side hustle.”

Lang chuckled, the sound dry and sharp. “Is that what this is? A moral crusade? You of all people? Spare me. You and I—we’re the same mess, just different upholstery.”

Nova’s smile stretched wider. “That right?”

“You play the rogue,” Lang went on, gesturing lazily with his glass. “The noble outlaw. But we both know you’ve done things no lawman could stomach. Hell, I’ve paid you to do them.”

Nova tilted his head. “True. You did. And then you stopped.”

Lang took a slow sip. “Because you were getting sloppy. Because the job shifted. We don’t need blades anymore, Nova. We need suits. Votes. Leverage.”

“Sure. And missing refugee aid convoys?” Nova asked. “That leverage too?”

Lang’s smirk didn’t break. “Supplies get misplaced. Routes shift. You know how logistics works.”

“And the children from the outer moons?” Nova asked, voice still casual. “The undocumented ones no one’s tracking. The ones who vanished between settlements.”

Lang sighed like a man humoring a child. “Nova. These places are chaos. Kids disappear. Families lie. You can’t put every tragedy on one man's shoulders just because he bought a vineyard.”

Nova’s smile didn’t fade, but something behind it stilled—like the edge of a blade stopping mid-swing.

Lang finally noticed.

He set the glass down. “You’re not here for work, are you?”

Nova's tone dropped, too even. “No.”

Lang’s brow creased. “Nova, think this through. You really want to make enemies over rumor and sentiment?”

Nova’s eyes didn’t blink. “I didn’t come here for rumor.”

Lang’s eyes widened as the realization set in. “You’re not asking me questions. You’re setting me up.”

Nova took a step closer, his voice quieter now, more focused. “Took you long enough.”

Lang backed toward the edge of the desk, forcing a shaky smile. “Look, I get it. Someone paid you. Someone with an axe to grind. Fine. You want credits? You want a name? We can work something out. You don’t have to do this.”

Nova didn’t answer.

Lang reached for a drawer—slowly, stupidly—and Nova kicked it shut without looking.

Lang’s tone sharpened. “You think I’m just some fat suit? I’ve survived worse than you. You want blood, fine. Let’s see what you bleed.”

He lunged.

Nova barely moved. One twist, one step, and Lang was on the floor, elbow pinned behind his back, face pressed to polished tile.

“Stop!” Lang gasped. “Nova—wait—wait. You’re making a mistake. You don’t understand who you’re crossing.”

Nova crouched beside him, expression unreadable.

Lang wheezed, spitting blood. “This isn’t just about me. Nova, I like you– you– you dont want this–he’s not going to like this.”

That made Nova pause. It made Dallum pause as well. Who did Lang mean? Who was watching Nova? Who was supposed to see this? Dallum? Someone else? He lingered on the questions too long before continuing the playback. 

Icarus Nova showed no hesitation in his pause. No fear.

Stillness.

Nova stared down at him for a long, cold moment.

Then stood.

Straightened his coat.

Spoke softly—calm, absolute.

“Let him see.”

Lang’s face drained of color.

Nova pulled the blade from beneath his coat. It gleamed dully in the soft office light.

“Nova, please—this doesn’t have to—”

Lang shouted, trying to crawl backward, but Nova grabbed him by the collar and threw him onto the desk, scattering glass, data pads, and a bottle of aged liqueur. The senator kicked weakly, legs scraping the tile. Nova’s mechanical hand clamped down on his chest, the faint mechanical whir building again — steady, rhythmic, like a clock winding down. 

Lang began to scream.

The first cut wasn’t deep. Shallow. A red line that beaded and spread, just below the chin. Nova watched the blood well up and used the tip to follow its path, carving gently, like outlining a map.

Nova leaned in, whispering like a teacher explaining something to a child. “You funded ghost towns with aid money. Let starving families die so your estate could get a new irrigation system.”

Lang sputtered, eyes bulging. “I—I didn’t know! Not the details! I just signed forms, Nova, that’s all—just routing—”

“The children?” Nova asked, tilting his head.

Lang whimpered, “No one proved that. There was no evidence. You can’t know for sure—”

Lang thrashed, bucked, tried to pull away. Nova held him still with inhuman strength, and pressed the blade again — deeper this time, slower. Lang struggles thrashing violently. 

“You have no idea what suffering means,” Nova whispered, lips almost at Lang’s ear. “Not yet.”

He dragged the knife down, following the curve of Lang’s throat to his sternum, deliberately avoiding arteries. Lang’s screams turned to gurgles, then to panicked gasps. His hands clawed at Nova’s coat, at his own flesh, at nothing.

Nova was expressionless. No fury. No sadism.

Lang kicked, uselessly. Blood gushed onto the tile, thick and arterial. He begged between gasps. “No—please—please, I’m sorry—stop—stop—”

Just quiet focus.

He twisted the blade, once, beneath Lang’s ribcage. Not to finish. Just to feel him jerk.

Blood soaked the senator’s tailored shirt, dripped onto the marble, pooled against the desk legs like ink from a broken contract. Still, Nova didn’t move to end it.

Lang’s body sagged forward, twitching. His scream faltered into wet choking.

Only then did Nova slit the throat.

Not a clean slice — a drawn-out tear across muscle and cartilage. A noise like wet paper ripping. A fountain of red erupted, splashing Nova’s boots and the desk surface in thick, arterial arcs.

Nova let him slide down, hands still twitching, breath rasping against nothing. The senator died watching him.

Nova stared back.

Lang's body sagged backward over the edge of the desk, arms limp, fingers twitching as if clinging to the last moments of breath. The blood had soaked through his shirt, his jacket, even the padding beneath the desk — pooling in thick, sluggish streams across the polished floor.

Nova stood over him, the knife still in hand, breathing steady.

He didn’t clean it immediately.

Instead, he watched.

Watched Lang bleed out in ragged gasps, eyes wide, mouth working soundlessly. He watched the light leave him in pieces. Not with pleasure. Not with hatred. But with something like relief.

As if this moment—the silence, the stillness, the undoing of a man—was the only thing that made sense anymore.

He closed his eye for half a second, breathing in the copper stink of blood, old stone, and rotting wealth. The kind of smell no fire would ever fully burn out of a room.

Then he wiped the blade on Lang’s silk sleeve.

His boots scraped softly against the tile as he turned toward the door.

And paused.

His eyes drifted to the desk.

The pause wasn’t long. A moment, maybe two. But deliberate. Knowing.

Dallum, watching the footage, froze the frame.

Nova's head tilted slightly — not a look at the desk, but through it.

Then he walked away.

No rush. No panic. Just the soft brush of his coat over marble and blood as he disappeared out the door.

Dallum’s hand trembled slightly as he keyed open the supporting file: Psychological Debrief – Kella Marsten – Interview, Day 3.

Dallum leaned back from the footage, stomach tight, pulse ticking behind his eyes. The room around him felt too quiet now, as if the air itself were recoiling.

He’d watched a dozen aftermaths, sifted through autopsies, holo-recordings, eyewitness statements of the damage left behind.

This — this was different.

This one he had seen.

Not just the result. Not the crater, not the corpse.

He had seen Nova do it.

Had heard the voice. Watched the shift from sardonic banter to surgical violence. Watched the silence that came after.

And now, through the psych file logs, he was seeing it again — but through her.

Kella Marsten. Hidden under the desk. Breathing shallow. So close to death she could smell the blood before it hit the floor.

He scanned through her transcript again, this time slower.

“When he mentioned the refugee convoys, the missing children—I felt it in my chest. He was quoting things from the article. From my article. The one I thought I’d buried with a dead drop.”

Dallum stopped.

He hadn’t caught that. Not in the footage. He’d thought Nova was generalizing — repeating the headlines, the whispers, the rumors from the Outer Rings.

But Kella was right.

The way Nova described the refugee supply trails, the number of undocumented children lost, the names of specific moons — those weren’t public. Not in detail.

He’d read the original draft.

Dallum’s fingers hovered over the pause key.

Nova hadn’t just known Lang was guilty. He had researched it. He had prepared. He had studied Kella’s work, sought out something buried, something anonymized. And then he had used it — not just to condemn Lang…

But to spare her.

“I thought he was going to kill me too. He looked at the desk. He saw the blood trickling toward me. I stopped breathing. My heart was trying to claw out of my throat. And the He just walked away. Like I didn’t matter. Or like… I’d already done what he needed.”

Dallum shivered.

There were no other killings like this. No other incidents where Nova lingered, savored, drew it out like a ritual.

No other cases with a survivor he chose to leave behind.

This wasn’t cleanup. It wasn’t a job.

“I don’t know if that’s mercy. Or a message.”

Dallum suddenly wasn’t sure either.

Because whatever this was, it felt… staged. Performed.

Nova had made sure someone was there to witness it.

And now, months later, someone else was watching it — him.

Dallum felt it now — that cold sense at the edge of his thoughts.

Nova hadn’t spared Kella out of pity.

He had chosen her. Just like he had chosen the scene, the timing, the moment.

Lang wasn’t just a target. He was a symbol.

And Kella… a required witness.

Just like Dallum was now.

He leaned forward slowly, reopening his personal log. But this time, he didn’t just document.

He confessed:

Nova let the moment stretch, slow and deliberate. He built this. Like theater.

He knew the crimes. He sourced them. Traced them to their origin. Kella’s article was his script. Lang’s confession was his cue.

And the killing? That wasn’t punishment. It was punctuation.

Kella wasn’t collateral. She was essential. She was the first witness.

And now, I’m the second.

He paused before leaving — just for a second. Not to admire the work. But to confirm it had been seen.

'Let him see.'

That line wasn’t a warning.

It was confirmation the message had been delivered.

And I got it.

I saw.

Dallum ended the recording.

The terminal dimmed slightly as the screen returned to the frozen image of Nova stepping through blood into shadow, leaving behind two bodies — one dead, and one forever changed.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Second Encounter

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13

Dallum didn’t wait.

When Syla Ventis’s name reappeared in the EIC dispatch logs — not flagged, just requesting contact — he routed a skimmer and headed dockside. She'd reached out. That was enough.

Dockside quarters, tucked behind scaffolds and rusted pressure valves. The place felt halfway between a workshop and a bunker. Salvage readouts blinked on cracked holos. Stim-coffee steamed in a chipped mug beside a bundle of coil-stripped cabling. A rotating fan made a low, failing groan in the corner.

Syla Ventis looked up from the mess, a data spike still pinched in her fingers.

“Oh dont be a stranger Investigator Ostraus, I been expectin ya and I dont plan on shooting you less you irk me,” Syla said, though he wasn’t. Her voice was smoke-rough, slightly wry — and warmer than he expected.

Time hadn't aged her, but it had armored her. In clipped phrases, in hard glances. This was a woman who had survived losing things more than once. Scrap pieces still decorate her braids and grey streaks now dance at the roots of her curls.

He remembered the EIC debrief that started His investigation months ago. For Syla it was years ago. That recorded interview about a strange encounter in a decades old war wreckage site. Syla’s recorded statement had been clipped, mechanical, almost too formal — like she was scared of saying the wrong thing. This woman was not that. This Syla carried her weariness like armor.

“You watched the old footage,” she said, more a statement than a question.

Dallum nodded. “It was… cautious.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, gesturing to him. “I was trying not to get arrested back then.”

The place didn’t have chairs so much as makeshift perches — a hover crate here, a coiled bundle of salvage blankets there. He chose the less oily one.

“So.” Syla poured two cups of something black and bitter. “You want to hear about the fire.”

Dalllum politely accepted the cup and nodded. Quickly setting up his recording equipment. 

“It was a scrap run,” Syla said. “High pay, corporate salvage. Stealing technically. The wreck sites were under different jurisdiction. Not that that’s ever stopped me. The job was kind where they didn't ask too many questions. Neither did we. I brought a few of my own crew. Fresh hires. They brought more.”

“They?”

“The Corp that hired us. I didn't know these other hires. Was told they were backup. Thought they were ex-mil. Didn’t look like it. Too clean.”

“And Nova?”

“Didn’t expect him. He wasn’t on the sheet. Just showed up, late. Head down. Smiles and coat. No introduction. Didn’t remember me — not that I blamed him. Last time was years back, and even then, we were just in his way. Still, he was... polite. Detached. Focused.

Said he was here for the front push, like it was a damn weather report. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t ask who we were. Just wanted the access codes and his half of the payout.”

Dallum leaned in.

“What went wrong?”

Syla gave a short, dry laugh. “Rookies. From one of the other teams. Spooked a relay. Triggered automated defenses we didn’t even know were still online.”

She didn’t mince words about the chaos that followed — motion turrets, sealed doors, fire traps tripping in sequence. Two of her crew lost. One blinded. Screams over comms. Retreat orders issued across all channels.

“He walked through it,” she said. “Literally. I watched him move through that corridor like he already knew where the blast cones would hit. Through flame, through falling ventwork — like it was all staged and he was just… ignoring it.”

Dallum felt a chill. “Was he calm?”

“No,” Syla said. “He wasn’t calm. He was detached. Like nothing in that moment was new to him. Like the fire was familiar.”

She paused, squinting toward the wall.

“He walked into that bay like it wasn’t burning. Fire didn’t slow him down. Neither did gunfire. I tried to call him off. Said the payout wasn’t worth it. But he didn’t flinch.

He just gave me a look like I wasn’t part of the equation. Not cruel. Not even cold. Just… distant. Like his math didn’t include me at all.”

He noted the phrase. ‘Like he wasn’t part of the equation.’ That was the second time someone had said that

“He made a joke — something about ‘not dying on a discount.’ Then kept walking. It was so… off. Like the chaos was just background to him. He didn’t flinch. Kept pushing for the salvage. He didn’t look like he was trying to win. Just survive. Or prove he could.”

Dallum remembered Acravis. Nova asking about old vent routes like he’d grown up in them. She hadn’t mentioned ducts, but it made sense. Syla had said the fire caught everyone off-guard. But Nova had moved like he’d already mapped the exits.

And then there was Rael who swore Nova could sniff out blind spots Rael hadn't even noticed

She doesn’t speak with awe. Not anymore. It’s sharper now. Less myth. More smoke. More blood. When she says his name, it’s not reverent.

It’s complicated.

“I thought he was going to die in there,” she says, barely above a whisper. “And I think he wanted to. Or needed to. But he kept going like he was chasing something… or running from something worse.”

Dallum doesn’t interrupt. He just writes that down.

Syla ran her fingers through her hair, pushing a streak of engine grease back behind her ear.

“I followed him,” she admitted. “Didn’t trust him, not really. But in the moment? Maybe I just didn’t want to walk away empty-handed. Maybe I thought walking beside a ghost made me less disposable. It was like following inevitability. Like he had to get somewhere, and if I stayed close, I might survive.”

She didn’t say it like an excuse.

“He looked like he was already surviving something worse.”

“He walked through the flame like he’d drawn the map in another life. Knew which ducts would hold. Which metal wouldn’t buckle. It was Deliberate, and god damn lucky.”

“He didn’t leave empty-handed,” she said, correcting Dallum’s earlier assumption. “Most of the haul burned, sure. But he got to one of the deep vaults before the upper decks gave out.”

She lets out a bitter laugh.

“And if I hadn’t followed him? We’d have walked away with nothing. My crew would've been docked, maybe blacklisted. But he — he pulled a payload out of the flames like it was routine. Dropped it at my feet and kept walking like none of it mattered.”

Dallum had heard Nova described as a ghost, a killer, a miracle. This wasn’t new, but it was rare. A similar echo was laced behind Rael’s bitterness. A man who saved. This time a salvage job with unflinching math and a scorched coat. Not myth. Not monster. Just necessary.

She shakes her head, slower now.

“I didn’t even check what we pulled. Didn’t care. He’s the only reason we got paid. No one ever mentions that in their ghost stories.”

After the meeting, Dallum pulled the incident logs. He wasn’t chasing confirmation — not exactly. But her version felt... rehearsed by trauma. Not inauthentic. Just... repeated. And then he found Vellin.

The incident report listed a Vellin Kalt. Minor injuries, burned hands, shock symptoms, eventual discharge from contract duty. Vellin’s statement was clipped, half-coherent, but the phrasing stuck. 

“He didn’t run. He walked. Through fire. Limping. Arm whirring like it didn’t belong to him. He looked like he was fixing something only he could see. Or trying to finish a circuit that only made sense if it hurt.”

Syla didn’t hear that testimony.

But her version matched it all the same.

Vellin added something else. “You could hear it, under the coat. Whirring like it didn’t fit right. Like it wasn’t his. But it worked. He used it to tear open a sealed door. He pulled three people and myself out. There was something else there, in him. This whirring. Not just servo hum or clicking of his arm. Something deeper. Unstable. Like an engine eating itself. I only caught a note before I was shoved and yelled at, hastily pointed in the direction of an exit. I wasn't going to fight Icarus Nova of all people.”

Joren’s words came back to Dallum — Nova moved like the arm wasn’t made for him. Like it was borrowed.

And the fanatic had said it too: not synthetic, repurposed.

But from where?

Dallum didn’t know.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12

[BEGIN UNAUTHORIZED LOG – ENTRY 3]

I’m tired.

Not of the case. Of the weight of it. The shape it keeps changing into. I am no closer to finding Nova.

Every time I think I have a version of him — something solid, even if incomplete — it unravels. Not because it’s false, but because it’s all true. Just… not at the same time.

Syla saw something cold and detached. 

Zenith describes a man who was drowning. 

Kie-Mara called him  chaos with a purpose.

Rael was too bitter to realize Nova saved him, but I wasn’t so blind..

Lyss — Lyss wanted to believe he was something fragile in a world that breaks things too easily.

Vennah cursed him as a broken mirror, beautiful to look at but useless to touch.

And the fanatic? The one who broadcasts under “Anchor Prophet”? They think he’s divine. A cosmic splinter. An aftershock in human form.

Too many masks. No clear face beneath. No clear connections. No past to be discovered. 

And I’m supposed to make sense of that? As if truth is just a sharper lens. It’s not. Sometimes the truth is the blur. The damage left by trying to focus on something that refuses to be one thing.

He wants to be seen. I’ve said that. I don’t know if I still believe it.

Nova moves in the shadows. Even in clubs, even in brothels, even in places meant for exposure—he slips through. He speaks, but never to reveal. Every word feels like a deflection. Like he won't– or maybe can't reveal himself. Seen like a scar is seen — a mark that dares you to ask where the wound was.

And now?

Now there are followers.

Not many. Not loud. But enough. 

People who trace his footsteps like coordinates for prophecy. People who whisper his name like it’s a key to something deeper. People who think he means something.

That Ghost Frequency stream? It should’ve been noise. Static. Just another delusion wrapped in poetry.

But it knew things.

The Romeo Rust alias. Details from the brothel blackout on Belatri. Mentions of black blood confirmed in the Tarnas moon bar incident. Even the phrasing: “He walks the wound.” I wrote that weeks ago in an off-record note.

Now it’s showing up in someone else’s doctrine.

Or maybe I just thought it was mine. Maybe it was planted there too.

That’s what’s bothering me. The trail is too clean. The coincidences too timely.

That part I can’t shake.

It’s not just that Nova is unknowable. It’s that the path through him is curated.

At first I thought maybe Nova fed it. Maybe he wanted to be found in the right myth.

But now?

I don’t think it’s him.

Not because he wouldn’t — but because he couldn’t. Nova isn't sloppy. Not in a way that leaves clean footprints.

The fanatic’s voice wasn’t wandering. It was precise. Scripted, almost.

Joren and Kreff both noted Icarus's discomfort with his augments.Rael said Nova somehow knew about their plan for the Orzen Asset Recovery Bureau — details they’d barely whispered, let alone broadcast. Looking back those two dolls at the Glitterstack made a similar suggestion. Like Nova wasn't in control. Like he was running from something. 

And Kie-Mara had said it. Plain as day. There was a contact.

I ignored it. Thought it was some job board posting, maybe a contact from a previous job Nova took on.

But I should have noted it sooner. Kei-Mara was protective of the name. I’d assumed it was just business practice. Now I see more clearly.

Nova executes. He doesn’t orchestrate. Nova doesn’t work in clean trails. He disappears mid-breath. He hides in plain sight. Rael was right, Nova is not some mastermind. He is on a leash.

No, there’s a third hand here.

Someone who may have the bigger plan.

So who?

Who knew where I’d look? When I’d be watching? Who timed the stream upload before I filed the Tarnas Moon report?

Kie-Mara. Toren’s account of Nova’s revenge. Nova’s ship — just left there. Too easy. Too intact. Like someone wanted it catalogued. they weren’t just clues. They were placed. Each with just enough truth to move me forward. Each with contradictions sharp enough to cut away certainty.

Who benefits from Nova being chased — or seen — or mythologized?

The Quiet Reckoning was supposed to be the end of it. The war ran out of planets. We built the EIC from the ashes. I read the founding documents myself. But maybe the war didn’t end. Maybe it bled sideways — into memory, into myth, into something darker than either empire ever admitted.

Maybe this is what comes after a war that killed too many to count. Not justice. Not peace. Just stories. Cleaner ones. Easier to believe than the truth

The fanatic said it clearly: “Nova isn’t the one who ends the war. He’s what’s left when it ends.”

This isn’t just investigation anymore. It’s narrative.

And I’m not sure I’m the one writing it.

Maybe I never was.

Nova’s the knife. But someone else is holding the hilt.

[END UNAUTHORIZED LOG – ENTRY 3]

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Mythic Frequencies

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11

The blacknet was noise, mostly. Junk code, ghost boards, forums overrun with spammed AI babble and smugglers whispering about caches that hadn’t existed in decades. Dallum scoured it anyway. After Acravis, he’d made a habit of chasing threads no one else would bother with — dead ends, mostly.

The blacknet was a graveyard of buried signals. He kept digging.

Not because he expected answers. But because the further this case dragged, the more the real leads felt like noise and the noise started to blur together. Muddling the image he is trying to capture.

One stream caught his eye.

He’d seen it before — minor ops poisoned by obsessed fans and false prophets. Cults of personality forming around serials, mercs, ghosts. He expected trash.

What he didn’t expect was Ghost Frequency.

It was buried deep, nearly static on login. Less than a hundred subscribers. Most were bots, dead accounts, or ghost follows routed through bounce nodes. The stream flickered like it had been recorded on a dying ship’s backup cam.

The voice came slow.

Distorted. Calm.

Low-frequency hum curling beneath every word like it echoed from inside a hull.

“He’s not a man. He’s a scar. The kind the universe grew over… but never healed. You think he’s just another merc. Another blade-for-hire gone rogue. But blades don’t bleed backwards. Blades don’t walk the same alley three years apart wearing the same smile. Blades don’t break the wheel that spins the war.”

There was a long pause, just the soft hum of background distortion, like wind through old speakers. The speaker — who called themselves Anchor Prophet — didn’t rant. They preached.

They spoke like a conspiracy had opened its ribs to them. Like they had seen something and now their life’s work was to make others understand — not out of fear, but devotion

“You don’t understand what you’ve seen. Because you think history ends. You think wounds close. Icarus Nova isn’t a name. It’s a pressure point. A sliver left in the skin of history. Olympus tried to erase him. Chronus tried to bind him. Neither succeeded. Because he wasn’t born from the war — he was what the war revealed. Nova walks the wound.”

One phrase hit harder than it should’ve.

Nova walks the wound.

Dallum had written that. Not in a report — in his personal logs, weeks ago. Almost word for word.

Had he read this stream before? No. He would’ve remembered. Unless… the thought wasn’t original.

Unless he was starting to think in someone else’s cadence.

The fanatic’s voice crackled with reverence, like a priest describing a miracle. They made wild claims. Some laughable. Some chilling in their poetry. Dallum let it play. This wasn’t a madman. It was a convert.

“His arm? Not synthetic. Repurposed godkiller tech. Olympus vault, pre-protocol. Designed to destroy concepts. Not people. Ideas.”

Kreff called the thing mismatched. Joren said he flexed it wrong. A godkiller wouldn’t stutter like rust. And yet… the thing worked. Better than it should’ve. Maybe it wasn’t designed for Nova. Maybe he was just the last one reckless enough to wear it. Still there was an inkling of truth to the conspiracy. 

Dallum started a log. Categorized claims by believability. Most were obvious fiction.

“You think that eyepatch hides an injury? It doesn’t. Look long enough, and your mind folds in. It’s a wound in time.”

Clearly false.

“He drinks Dust. Liquid. Raw. Not for power. For clarity. To keep the voices aligned.”

Dust is a highly regulated substance—Liquid Dust didn’t exist. Couldn’t exist. Dust crystallized under starbirth pressure but…

But Dallum had seen stranger things burned for less.

Dallum realizes quickly that this is likely another dead end. Just lies and rumors, but not all of it. Some matched things no outsider should know.

“He walks where systems collapse. He calculates failure.”

That didn’t match what Rael said. Or Kie. They painted a man held on a leash — volatile, barely manageable. But Syla… Syla had said he vanished with precision. And with the Orzen Asset Recovery Bureau? He didn’t guess where the sabotage was. He read it. Maybe not a tactician. But not random, either.

Something else. Something that played dumb until it didn’t.

“He doesn’t cast a shadow. Just reflections. And mirrors hate him.”

More nonsense. But then—

“His blood?” the Prophet whispered, almost lovingly. “Not red. I’ve seen it. Obsidian. Static and sawdust. Memory. No oxygen. Just echo.”

Dallum’s breath caught.

That part wasn’t myth.

The MedRep from the Bar report from around a month back. The blood that flagged as Nova’s that black residue at the scene. Almost dismissed as oil at the time. But it wasn’t. It matched the biochemical signature they’d gathered from other places Nova had been. No one would have known that.

Unless they’d seen it.

Or Nova had shown them.

The voice shifted tone. Softer. More intimate.

“Romeo Rust. That’s what he called himself on the outskirts. That’s what he was called by the ones who held him when he didn’t know how to sleep.”

Dallum sat upright. That alias hadn’t been released. Lyss and Vennah had said it. But it was buried in sealed transcripts. Unless–No. Nova didn’t spread rumors. But Someone else did. Someone watching him as closely as Dallum was.

Maybe closer.

“He walks like the air remembers him. He leaves no footprints. Only shifts in pattern. Ask the brothel on Belatri — why did only one room keep power when the grid died?”

That too, never published. Dallum blinked, scrolling to the incident logs. The power anomaly had stumped even the EIC systems team. No one had flagged it as Nova, but that didn't mean it wasn't him.

Had the stream scraped his logs? Was this recycled data?

No. The post was older.

Dallum checked. The broadcast had been uploaded nearly two months before he filed his tarnas Moon report. Before he even met with Toren or Rael. Whoever this Anchor Prophet was, they’d found this information before Dallum. 

And then came the part Dallum hated most — not the madness, but the clarity buried within it.

“They say the war ended eight years ago. Lies. It didn’t end. It just ran out of planets. You think the war ended because the empires made peace? No. It ended because there were no more planets left to burn.”

Dallum scowled.

That, too, was true. Everyone knew The Quiet Reckoning is what halted the centuries long war. Its how the Intergalactic Enforcement Concord even came to be. Why he is even able to do this job now.

He’d seen the founding documents. The EIC came together not in peace — but exhaustion. Olympus and Chronus had ravaged 872 systems before planets began to refuse. An un-organized collection of planets rose up and refused to be staging grounds. It wasn’t diplomacy. It was a blockade. A collective no from planets who had buried too many sons and daughters for someone else’s war.

“The Quiet Reckoning,” the fanatic intoned. “They called it a compromise. But I say it was the warning bell. And he — he was the echo. The blade that ended the war didn’t swing. It walked. Across the stars. One step per scar. The Chronian seers wrote it. The day the silence grew louder than the cannons, a weapon would walk. Not one of steel or fire. One made of loss. He doesn’t fight for sides. He walks where the forgetting hurts most. And reminds the stars they’re still bleeding. Icarus Nova isn’t the one who ends the war. He’s what’s left when it ends.”

Dallum’s fingers hovered above the pause key.

The voice felt like it was speaking directly to him now. Like it knew where he’d paused. Knew what line would catch his breath. Each word was a breadcrumb — not scattered randomly, but laid out. As if for a follower.

He realized something strange:

Icarus had appeared right after the war ended.

Not during. After.

Dallum rewound. Played the phrase again.

“He’s what’s left when it ends.”

That was how this Prophet saw him. Not a killer. Not a myth. But the aftershock.

The fanatic never claimed Nova was evil.

Not once.

To the Anchor Prophet, Icarus was divine.

Not a savior.

Not a villain.

But a constant.

The grief that remains after the war is forgotten. The face you see in the silence between disasters. The itch behind peace.

There were contradictions, of course. The fanatic claimed Nova was dead. Immortal. Digital. Divine. Human. Sometimes all in the same sentence.

“He was born in the dirt tunnels of Acravis. Or was it Chronus? No. Olympus made him. But he bled on all of them.”

“He died in Darakhan. And then again in Cassera. And then in the orphan field outside Volic Station. He’s never died the same way twice.”

“Three planets. One hour. Same timestamp. I checked the scans. He was on Caldra, Remos, and Tekan-4 within the same sixty minutes. Either he splits like prism light… or time bends to make room for him.”

Lies. Impossible.

And yet…

The cadence. The confidence. It got under your skin.

“They tried to kill him. I read the autopsy. Olympus tagged him as KIA twice. Once in the Bractin push. Once in the Drift mutiny. But you can’t kill an echo. You can only stop listening.”

But Dallum had learned something important about belief:

It doesn’t need to be consistent.

It just needs to fill the hole.

The fanatic needed this myth. Needed to believe someone had walked through the worst the galaxy could offer and still kept going. That something had survived the war unchanged. That scars could become maps.

And Nova?

Nova gave them just enough truth to make the myth feel real.

Dallum played the final segment again.

“He’s not hiding,” the voice said. “He’s remembering. What the rest of you pretend to forget.”

He closed the file.

Flagged the stream.

Tried to track the origin.

Ghost Frequency was well-cloaked — bounced through five planetary nodes and shielded by old war-grade encryption. Anchor Prophet was careful. A believer, but not sloppy.

Dallum leaned back.

This felt orchestrated. Like the intel that led him to Kie-Mara. Like the Acravis footage surfacing just when he was ready to look.

Not answers. Nudges.

Not directions. Permission.

He used to think it was Nova. Now… he wasn’t so sure.

He didn’t know what scared him more — that Nova might’ve fed this fanatic…

…or that someone else was feeding both of them.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Bones of the City

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

The footage shouldn’t have stood out. Just another overlooked transit hub buried in the lower Burrows of Acravis — a place where the walls sweated with recycled air and every corridor hummed like a hive on the edge of collapse. The timestamp marked it over three year backs. Typical.

What wasn’t typical was the scale. Acravis wasn’t just dense — it was endless. A planet devoured by its own city, layered in towers like sediment, choked in scaffolding, ducts, forgotten lines of power and population. A maze that built itself over itself until maps became suggestions and sky was a rumor.

Dallum had known it would be bad. He had attempted to procrastinate on the lead but it was the best he had to find out who Nova really was. Real records. Identity. Home. He hadn’t known it would be this.

The archive was a catastrophe: untagged logs, redundant timestamps, entire months catalogued under the wrong century. Half the footage corrupted, the other half mislabeled by ghosted operators or defunct AI. No one reviewed these feeds unless someone died screaming or a reactor blew.

Dallum had spent nearly two weeks in the mess — twelve-hour stretches hunched over blinking feeds, dragging corrupted data through dead indexes. He was used to the EIC’s systems: clean, sharp, responsive. This wasn’t work. This was excavation. Digging through time with bare hands, praying the fossils still whispered.

Something tugged at him. A small fraction of a frame.He didn’t know why. his hand was already moving. Rewind. Pause. Watch again. A flash of bright purple. Rewind.

There. Right side of the screen. A lean figure with a half-limping gait and a stitched coat hem trailing just above the grating. The hair was shorter, freshly cut — almost military. The eyepatch was clean, the cybernetic arm stiff, like it hadn’t settled into his frame yet. He looked fresher. Not cleaner, not healthier — just newer. Like a machine reassembled Almost right. But not quite comfortable in its skin.

He'd flinched at kindness. Hesitated in sterile corridors. But here, in the rust and wires, he moved like a man who’d come home from war to find the ruins still waiting. There was something else, too. A weight in his posture. Not slouched, not beaten — just… wethered. Like he was carrying something he hadn’t decided whether to set down or sharpen. 

Dallum watched the footage again, searching for threat, pattern, clues.

The timestamp put it barely a month before the Syla incident. A real first sighting. Been buried in these jumbled Acravin systems this whole time. 

“He didn’t hide this time,” Dallum muttered, voice thin over the hum of his console. “He strolled. Like the world owed him space.”

He put in a formal trace for all vendor interactions logged in that sector over a 6-hour window. Most turned up nothing useful — food carts, currency exchanges, the usual flux of travel. But one thread caught.

Vendor #90478-J — specialty salvage tech.

The camera caught Nova pausing, speaking briefly with an older man behind the stall, then collecting a small bundle of parts. Nothing illegal. But not ordinary either. Filament wiring. Old servos. A casing adapter for a series of mechanical limbs phased out before the last war.

Obsolete, but not junk.

Dallum leaned in. Nova handled the parts carefully. He didn’t scan them or test for compatibility. He already knew.

And yet — he moved like someone not entirely at ease with his own body. The left arm especially. Like it had been replaced… and he hadn’t quite forgiven it yet.

Dallum submitted a background query. The vendor was listed as Joren Vent, citizen of the lower burrows, former maintenance lead for Acravis’ defunct terraforming tunnels.

He requested a call.

When Joren answered, his voice crackled like someone who hadn’t updated their comm filters in a decade. But he was friendly. Curious. Not afraid.

“Yeah,” Joren said after Dallum described the man. “I remember him. Bought some odd things. Quiet fellow. Polite. Looked tired. Real tired. Like he hadn’t been welcomed anywhere in a long time.”

“Did he seem local?” Dallum asked.

Joren chuckled. “Not by the coat, maybe. But he spoke Acravin better than most kids I see down here. Not the surface patter either — real Burrower-speak. Back-of-throat dialect. Things only people from the deep shafts know.”

Dallum felt the gears click into motion.

“What did he want the parts for?”

“Didn’t say. But he asked about old maps. Ductwork layouts. The ones we used before the new recycling systems. Said he wanted to know where the airflow used to run — not where it does now.”

Joren scratched his chin. “That’s what got me. He was clearly Acravin — no doubt in my mind. The way he spoke, the questions he asked, the way his hands moved when he pointed at the diagrams. But he was too young to remember those maps firsthand, probably filled with stories his parents used to tell him before he left for other worlds. Silly really. Those ducts haven’t carried air in decades. Most were sealed off after the gas ruptures in Cycle 72 or just collapsed from corrosion. We don’t even log them anymore. They're dead zones.”

He looked off-screen, thinking. “But he spoke about them like old friends. Knew the bends, the vent pitch, even the panel seams. Like he wasn’t just retracing something — like he was going home. I wonder if he had older relatives down there. Maybe he sought their ghosts.”

Joren added one more thing, almost as an afterthought.

“His arm wasn’t right. You get a feel for that sort of thing. He moved like it wasn’t built for him. Or maybe he hadn’t finished learning it yet.”

He tapped the side of his head, then added, “But the rest of him? That was Acravin work. None of that techy mambo jumbo with codes and screens. The real work. Engine. Wires. The kind of guy who could fix coolant leaks with scrap and prayer. He knew the weight of metal. That’s why the arm threw me — a man like that should’ve built his own.”

This was the first time Nova’s engineering skill had shown itself so plainly. Reflecting on Syla’s story, there had been glimmers — subtle cues that he could rig or recalibrate when pressed — but Rael said he didn’t understand tech, and Kie claimed he handled systems like they were traps wired to explode.

Now? Now he was buying with intent. Asking about routes no civilian should remember. And the parts? He hadn’t smuggled them offworld. Whatever Nova made… it stayed on Acravis.

Somewhere in the ducts. Hidden in the bones of a city too old to notice. Buried, maybe. Waiting.

The next witness was harder to track — a street tech named Kreff, pulled from a minor background citation buried in an old report. He’d been fined for illegal conduit rerouting, flagged for probationary engineering. But his name was logged as adjacent during the same marketplace window.

When Dallum called, Kreff answered fast — too fast. He clearly knew the call was coming and clearly hoped it might help his probation case.

“You’re calling about the guy in the old coat, right?”

Dallum didn’t bother playing coy.

“He was… strange,” Kreff said. “Like half the time he was remembering how to be human and the other half he was choosing not to.”

Dallum asked what he was doing.

“Adjusting his arm. Wiring tweaks. Didn’t look like he made the machine — more like he’d inherited it and didn’t trust it yet.”

Kreff paused, then added with an awkward laugh, “Truth is, I tried to lift something from him. Thought he was from out of the city, off world. Thought he looked distracted. He caught me cold — but didn’t get mad. Just looked at me funny, like I reminded him of someone. Then he asked what I needed the wires for. Offered to help.”

Kreff’s voice lowered, like he still didn’t believe it. “Said I was chasing the wrong fix, but didn’t explain. Just muttered something about teeth in the wiring and walked off.”

Kreff was still chewing on it. Unsure whether he’d glimpsed genius or wreckage. Maybe both.

Kreff sounded like he was still chewing on the memory, unsure whether he’d seen something incredible or broken.

“I tried to lift something off him, yeah,” Kreff admitted. “But he caught me. Not just once four times. I tailed him a bit, figured maybe he had spares tucked away. He knew every time. Just turned and stared like he’d been waiting. No anger. Just… tired.”

Eventually, Kreff gave up the chase. “I told him what I was trying to fix. Old relay station, mostly fried. Couldn’t get the stabilizer loop to hold.”

To his surprise, Nova didn’t walk off.

“He knelt beside the unit like it mattered. Started tracing wires, pulling filaments. Spoke like he knew what every bend meant. Started dropping technobabble and old Acravin phrases in the same breath — stuff I hadn’t heard since apprenticeship. He said, ‘The short’s not in the wire, it’s in the memory of the wire.’ Like the system could remember its own failures.”

Dallum asked if the advice worked.

“Yeah,” Kreff said. “That’s the part that scares me. It worked.”

There was a pause.

“He kept muttering. Mostly to himself. Tech spill, system notes. But sometimes he’d just drift. Switch to true Acravin, thick like he never left. Talking like the city was listening.”

Dallum asked for specifics.

“One line stuck with me,” Kreff said. “‘The city remembers every breath, every wound.’”

Dallum sat in silence after the call.

Nova hadn’t hidden himself. He hadn’t masked his voice, or blurred the cams, or burned the trail. The footage was clean. The angles deliberate.

He had walked into frame.

It was a homecoming.

But no one had welcomed him back — no family, no old contacts, no gang ties. Just ducts and dust. The old systems. Forgotten airflow routes only someone born in the deep burrows would remember. He hadn’t returned to be seen by people.

He’d returned to speak with the bones.

Joren had seen the dialect in him — not learned, but lived. Kreff had seen the intuition — not taught, but remembered. The kind of engineering that didn’t come from manuals or uplinks, but from years spent crawling through rust and live wire. From fixing things to survive.

Nova hadn’t brought the parts out. Whatever he made, whatever he fixed — it remained on Acravis.

And it wasn’t just a mechanical repair.

“He was building something,” Dallum said aloud, his voice low. “But not just his arm. Not just a machine.”

Nova had gone home, but not to rest.

He had gone to remember something only the city still knew.

Dallum filed a private entry. Short. Tucked into the margins of the case file

He didn’t walk like a ghost.

He walked like someone haunted.

And beneath that, quieter still:

He came looking for something.

 Not to be found —

But to find what never left.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Sweetness and Shadows

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Dallum had spent the better part of three weeks chasing whispers through airlocks and back alleys.

Not leads, not really. Just sightings. Witnesses in fringe ports, bartenders in shuttle hubs, the occasional ex-courier with a story that always ended in smoke or silence. None of it actionable. But one pattern emerged: Nova wasn’t always working when he was seen. Some nights, he simply appeared. Alone. Quiet. Spent credits. Left no mark but memory.

Dal had traced those nights. Not to job sites, but to spaces between them clubs, dens, stations that didn’t show up on civilian maps. He wanted to know what the man did after. After the killing. After the jobs. After the name.

What was Icarus Nova like when no one needed him to be death incarnate?

That question, more than any file or report, dragged Dallum to two very different planets on opposite ends of the fringe. One orbiting a burnt-out star, half-deserted and half-forgotten. The other a neon hive of vice, built like a spire of noise stacked atop its own shadow.

Both places had one thing in common: someone who had seen Nova up close.

Not the worker. Not the killer.

The man.

Or whatever passed for one behind his eyes.

The station was quiet. Not peaceful  just tired. One of those orbiting outposts on the edge of breathable law, where the lights flickered like old memories and the air recyclers hummed louder than conversation. Dallum stepped off the shuttle into a corridor lined with closed doors and faded velvet. No signs. No menus. Just the kind of place people came to disappear for a little while or make sure someone else did.

The room was dim, lit in soft hues that tried too hard to be inviting. Dallum Ostraus sat in a booth that smelled faintly of old perfume and recycled air. The pleasure den was off-grid not illegal, not sanctioned. Just one of those in-between places where people knew how to be discreet.

Lysse entered like he owned the floor. He moved with a feline confidence, dressed in loose crimson silks, his hair a cascade of curls, lips glossed in the way that said he knew his worth. 

Lyss greeted him with a smirk, already reclined in the booth. Silk robes the color of spiced wine, a thin chain glinting at the collarbone, and eyes that clocked Dallum’s discomfort with something between amusement and pity. He sat across from Dal, crossed one leg over the other, and smiled like this was just another client meeting.

“You’re early,” Lyss said, voice smooth and disarming. “Either very professional, or very curious. I wonder which.”

"Before you ask," Lysse continued, voice smooth and warm, "I’m not sharing names, dates, or specifics. Client confidentiality is my entire business model, darling."

Dal nodded. “I’m not looking for receipts. Just impressions.”

Lysse’s smile softened. “Impressions I can do.”

There was a pause. A small game of staring and silence.

Then Lyss broke it.

“You want to know about Icarus Nova.”

Dallum nodded.

“He was quiet,” Lyss said. “But not the kind of quiet that pushes you away. The kind that pulls you in. Like he wanted to tell you something but had forgotten how.You know what it’s like, being near someone who doesn’t know how to rest? That was him. Wound tight, even when he slept. Like something was chasing him in the dark.”

Dallum waited, pen hovering.

“He didn’t come for what people think. Not for touch, not for thrill. He wanted to feel human whatever that meant to him. Sometimes he asked me to talk. Sometimes he just… sat. Gentle. Always gentle. Like he thought he might break you by accident.. Once  and this I will say; he fell asleep holding my wrist. Not possessive, just… anchored. Like he didn’t trust gravity to keep him in place. Slept for ten hours straight like someone who hadn’t closed his eyes in weeks.”

A sip from a glass. Lyss’s expression softened, distant now.

“I’ve seen broken men. Nova wasn’t broken. He was... unfinished. Like someone had stopped building him halfway through, left the scaffolding up and hoped no one would notice.”

“And did you ever feel afraid of him?” Dal asked.

Lyss tilted his head, smiling again.

“No. But I think I should’ve.”

Dallum didn’t let it slide. “Why?”

Lyss hesitated. His gaze flicked to the side, lips pressed tight. For the first time since the interview started, the practiced calm cracked.

“It was… once,” he said carefully. “A shift-change late cycle. Quiet night. Just me and Havi still on. Romeo came in—Nova, I mean—looking like something had chased him halfway across the system and then died trying. Didn’t say much, which wasn’t strange. But his energy was... sharp. Like a current under the skin.”

He took a breath, eyes narrowing at the memory.

“Havi made some joke. Nothing cruel. Something flirty, stupid. Nova didn’t laugh. Just stared at him, real still. Like his whole body had locked up except his eye—his real one. That thing gleamed like glass about to shatter.”

Dallum stayed quiet.

“I stepped in,” Lyss said. “Told him to sit down, that it was fine, that we could just… breathe for a minute. And he did. Eventually. Like the tension drained all at once. He even smiled again, but not the nice kind. The kind that says, you got lucky.”

Dallum scribbled something silently. Lyss noticed.

“It was nothing,” Lyss said quickly. “Everyone snaps now and then. He never touched us. Never raised his voice. Never came in like that again.”

“But you were scared,” Dallum said.

Lyss met his eyes. “Just for a moment.” Then softer: “But that moment’s stuck with me longer than most.”

Lyss leaned back in his seat, gaze unfocused now  like the weight of everything he hadn’t said had finally settled in his lap.

“But I like him,” he said, softer than before. “Not in the fairy-tale way. He’s no prince. And I’m not delusional.”

He glanced toward the window not looking at anything, just avoiding Dallum’s eyes.

“It’s more like… you meet someone who’s dying slower than they should be. Who looks fine until you see the pieces they’re holding together with a grin and a little tape. You want to see them fixed. Or at least not alone.”

There was a pause.

“Even if you know better.”

He wouldn’t say more. Dallum tried, gently. Got a polite shake of the head. Lyss smiled, leaned back, and ended the conversation with: “He needed company. But he didn’t use it. That’s rare. And sad.”

On the way out, he checked the station logs.

Nova had visited Lyss more than once. Same alias every time: Romeo Rust. Always the same private suite. Spaced out over several months irregular enough to look incidental, but consistent enough to make Dallum suspicious.

He flagged it anyway. Maybe if he could station a bounty nearby, they’d be around to catch Nova if he ever came back.

But he doubted it.

Still, he made a note. It wouldn’t amount to anything. It never did. But habits were easier to cling to than hope.

The next contact was already expecting him.

Vennah worked at a glitterstack club on Belatri Prime, a place louder, faster, more ruthless than the little moon Lyss called home. Where Lyss gave warmth, Vennah dealt in spectacle. Gossip, favors, leverage. Her clients didn’t come to feel known. They came to feel seen — and maybe feared.

And she remembered Nova too.

The next stop couldn’t have been more different.

Noise pulsed through the walls. Neon bled across the floor in pink and cobalt stripes. Club music beat against Dallum’s ribs like an accusation. The brothel was clean, upscale, and unapologetic a place where secrets glittered like glassware and rumors were served over crushed ice.

Vennah met him in the private lounge above the main floor all glass and chrome and champagne shimmer. She wore green like a challenge, her nails like daggers dipped in starlight. Dallum had interviewed syndicate accountants who made him sweat less. Vennah didn’t radiate charm  she weaponized it.. She didn’t greet him with courtesy she evaluated him like a bad credit risk.

Dallum got the feeling that information didn’t flow around her, it reported to her.

“So,” she said, lighting a slim stick of something citrus-scented, “you’re the one trying to catch a myth.”

“Only one,” Dallum replied.

“He gave me the creeps,” she said, exhaling a curl of golden smoke. “But not in the normal way. Didn’t leer. Didn’t flirt. Just paid to sit. Sometimes for hours. Said strange things. Equations. Stars in the wrong order. Names no one’s heard in cycles. One time  swear on my ledger  he started muttering in Acravin.”

Dallum stilled. “Acravin?”

She flicked ash into a glass dish shaped like a crescent moon. “Yeah. Not the polished kind. Burrower dialect. Deep-rift gutter-lace. The kind that scratches your throat going out. You don’t learn that unless you grew up in tunnels with ash in your lungs and rats for neighbors.”

She took another slow drag, then added, “Most of the time he talked like a drifter little bit of everywhere.Some Olympus phrasing. Even sounded like a stationborn brat once. But when he dozed off? When he forgot to keep the act up? Acravin came out pure. Natural. Like his tongue remembered home even if he didn’t.”

Dallum frowned at the implication. Acravin isnt a dead language. Just rare. Mostly spoken in the crushed undercities of Acravis itself. 

But the note rattled something in Dallum. He’d pegged Nova for an Olympian Vet. Or from the comet colonies. Some cold, war-taught edge. Not this. Not buried-accent under a city that never learned to stop building. 

It hit him harder:

He had never heard Nova speak.

Not in the recordings. Not in the testimonies. 

He’d watched Nova dozens of times on silent security feeds. Seen him move. Fight. Bleed. But not once had he heard his voice. Not in the Pax footage. Not in Rael’s account. Even though everyone complained about the man talking nonstop until jobs.

The lounge door cracked. Two of Vennah’s dolls slipped in  all glitter lashes, curve-hugging synthsilks, and the kind of laughter that could bankrupt a man in five minutes flat.

“Is this the guy about Romeo Rust?” the taller one asked, leaning on the back of the booth like he owned it. His grin was feral. “Stars, that man was gorgeous. Like he’d walked out of a crash site.”

“Ohhh gods,” the other one groaned, laughing into her drink. “Remember when he danced on the second-floor bar rail during quota night? Shirt slightly torn, blood on his knuckles, just daring someone to ask him why.”

“He wore pain like glitter. Like it proved something. Like if it wasn’t bleeding, it wasn’t real,” the first said, biting the straw off his cocktail. “All that purple hair and that dumb grin, like he was in on a joke the universe hadn’t finished telling.”

Dallum leaned forward. “Did he ever say who he was running from? A name? A system?”

They blinked, shrugged in unison.

“He said lots of things,” one replied. “Most of them didn’t make sense unless you were drunk or dreaming. He seemed like a dreamer to me.”

“He was the kind of client you wanted,” the second admitted, eyes glinting. “Not for the creds. For the story. Everyone wanted a taste.”

“Yeah, but no one ever got one,” the girl said. “Not really. He didn’t do anything. Never touched. Never even looked at you like he was thinking about it. Just paid for time. Sat there. Watching the lights spin.”

“And talked,” added the male, making a spiraling motion near his ear. “To himself. To the wall. Once he listed off dates for twenty minutes straight. I swear, one of them was the day the war ended. The rest? Who knows.”

“Did he mention Chronus? Olympus? Any connections?” Dallum asked, pressing gently.

“He said something about a broken planet,” the taller one replied. “But it could’ve been a metaphor. He was a real poet, y’know?”

“Lessa said she tried to press against him once,” the plumper one said. “Y’know, sweeten the vibe. He flinched like a live wire. She thought he’d glitch. I thought he’d kill her. He just Told her to sit two feet away and not breathe too loud.”

“She almost refunded the tip,” the sharp eyed muttered, giggling. “Said it felt like babysitting a bomb.”

Vennah, still watching them like a queen presiding over her favorite court, exhaled a pear-sweet breath.

“He was trouble,” she said simply. “Beautiful trouble. The kind that made you wonder if you could fix him or just survive the fallout.”

Dallum’s pen scratched the edge of the page. “Did he ever carry anything unusual? Weapons? Tech?”

“Not that I saw,” Vennah said. “But one of the bouncers said they scanned him and got static. No ID, no tags, the machine froze. Had to reboot the whole booth.”

Dallum froze. That kind of signal-jamming wasn’t standard gear. That was blacksite level tech. Military or worse.

“Oh, remember the Red Halo night?” the taller piped up. “He decked a bouncer over a joke. Something about passwords. Just cracked the guy across the mouth, smiled, and walked out like it hadnt happened.”

“We banned him after that,” Vennah said, voice cutting through the laughter like satin over a blade. “Not just for the punch.” The other two stiffened with her glare and excused themselves quickly. 

“He nearly broke one of my best girls. Sent her in soft, figured she was the right kind of calm. But Nova– or Rust, whatever he called himself that week  didn’t want calm. He wanted quiet. presence. Not warmth. Not comfort. Just… someone there. She’d leaned in to stroke his hair and he snapped. Broke her wrist. Might’ve done worse if Marn hadn’t been at the door and pulled him off her.”

Dallum looked up. “Was it the touch? Or something else?”

“Maybe both,” Vennah said. “She said he whispered, ‘Next hand on me leaves with fewer fingers.’ Then went dead quiet. Like he couldn’t trust the softness. Like he thought kindness came with a leash  and he’d rather break a wrist than wear one.”

Vennah raised her glass. “We called him the moth,” she said. “Because he always danced near the flame. It was only a matter of time really.”

Dallum looked up. “Why didn’t you blacklist him earlier?”

“Because he tipped like he was trying to disappear,” Vennah said with a smirk. “And because part of me hoped the next doll would be the one to crack him.”

Vennah let Dallum look through the ledgers and incident reports. He found backings for the broken wrist and the red halo crash, along with a few other notes on heavy drinking, and requests to not be assigned to Nova.Dallum sighed. Beneath the sugar and static, there were pieces here. Something about presence, a lack of connection, maybe thinly veiled daddy issues is all this would amount to. But everything meaningful came tangled in perfume and innuendo. 

But even rumors had roots.

Vennah hadn’t let him leave without testing his patience, as she’d put it. Nothing serious. Nothing recorded. But enough to remind him she trafficked in more than just gossip. And that some people shared information like they shared skin  close, conditional, and never without a price

Still, he underlined the note: why the fear?

A few travel cycles later, finally home and back in his office where he now stayed most nights alone, Dallum reviewed both interviews, the audio still warm, Vennah’s perfume still clinging to his collar like a dare even after days of travel. 

Lysse had seen kindness in a man who wanted peace, or at least the illusion of it. Vennah saw the shape of something waiting to break. A whisper dressed like a man.

The contradiction should’ve bothered him more. But instead, it rang true.

Nova wasn’t either of them.

He was both.

A man who came for silence and made it echo. A killer who held wrists gently.A stranger who spoke a buried language from a place its own people rarely leave.

Dallum made a note to request access to Acravin records. It would take cycles to comb through. Tens of millions of citizens, countless unregistered citizens buried under rock and steel. And of course it had to be Acravis. Of all the planets–orcity-planets in this case–, it had to be the one where names mean nothing unless you know the right dirt to dig in

And Dallum still hadn’t heard Nova’s voice.

That, more than anything, haunted him.

He filed his report with a quiet line tucked between the logs:

Subject demonstrates abnormal social engagement patterns. Possible code-switching. Possible trauma concealment. Origin still unclear — accent not previously reported. Acravin-Burrower confirmed via witness.

And below it, a personal note:

What else have I never heard?

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

[BEGIN UNAUTHORIZED LOG – ENTRY 2]

I should stop labeling these. As if the name matters when there’s no one left to report to but myself. Still — it helps. Helps me think.. Helps me draw the line between what I know and what I feel.

The line’s thinner now.

I received a message last cycle. Not a leak, not a traceable threat. Just words. Four of them.

“Blood is all they ever see.”

It came through a closed system. No uplink. No signal source. I triple-checked.I’ve run the diagnostics. Triple-checked the firmware. It shouldn’t be possible.

I want to believe it’s a plant. A remnant. A rogue ghost in the logs from some prior intrusion. That would be rational. But it wasn’t there before. And it was timed — perfectly — after the Darakhan file closed. Like punctuation.

Either someone is inside the system deeper than our engineers know how to look, or I’ve begun hallucinating with perfect formatting. Neither option comforts me.

And still… I can’t stop. 

And still… I can’t stop. The pieces don’t line up clean, but they trace a shape. Like orbiting debris — jagged, spiraling something I can’t yet name.

Syla said he was a ghost — not a presence but an absence, disappearing into wreckage before anyone even knew something had gone wrong. And while there’s no footage of what happened to her, I’ve reviewed other scenes. Surveillance from Tarnas Moon. Static-scrambled feeds from the Darakhan hit. Nova doesn’t vanish like a phantom — he vanishes like a surgeon. Every step calculated, every blind spot anticipated. You don’t move like that by accident.

Zenth knew the talkative version — rambling, magnetic, like a man trying to keep something buried under noise. He said Nova had been drinking deeper than usual that night — not to celebrate, but to sink. The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was pressure. Like a valve holding back something worse. Something that did burst that night. 

Pax described him as cold and mythical. A man who looked through her like she wasn’t even there. No hesitation. No words. no restraint. She wasn’t just shaken by what he did — it was what didn’t happen. He took a blast to the chest and didn’t fall. Didn’t even panic. As if pain had rules he no longer played by. Her security feed showed the angle — deliberate, centered, lethal. Yet moving like he was invincible. He raised the blaster, not as a threat, but as a conclusion. If Jerrit Sal hadn’t stepped in, she’d be dead. Nova didn’t miss. He just got intercepted.

Rael called it chaos. A betrayal. Said Nova went feral mid-mission, made them leave behind what they came to take.  But I’ve seen the schematics. Nova somehow saw the sabotage coming. It was designed to corner them. Nova didn’t panic — he pivoted. He read the space like it spoke to him. Found the gaps, the exits, the shape of survival. Rael didn’t see it. Too bitter. Too caught in the loss to see what had been spared.

Kie said he hated being boxed in. Complained about constraints, mocked the equipment, said the walls were too clean. He grumbled, but he obeyed. Followed the plan like it was a map he didn’t trust but refused to ignore. I reviewed the security logs — he hesitated at the interface, not because he was untrained, but because he didn’t trust it. Like someone who’s seen machines fail in ways people don’t come back from. His discomfort wasn’t fear. It was restraint. Nova on a leash.

Tovren called him a plague. Said he smiled like death wasn’t his decision — just something he carried. I cataloged the aftermath. Those weren’t just kills — they were anatomical deletions. Arterial cuts. Blades through nerve clusters. Every strike with surgical intent. No hesitation. No hesitation because there were no rules holding him back. No leash. He wasn’t boxed in, he was home.

And the orphan… the orphan just watched. No flinching. No weeping. Called him Death. But the longer I stared at that footage, the more I saw it: Nova saw something. What exactly I cannot tell. Something personal? Something logical? Perhaps it doesn't matter. I think Nova stopped because the child hadn’t become Cessari yet. That was mercy. 

Each voice paints a different shape. None of them whole.

But I keep chasing it.

Every story pushes me closer. Not to the truth — to something else. An… image. A shape that only appears when I stop trying to look straight at it.

That’s what gnaws at me. Not the violence. Not the myth. The pattern.. Everything is too deliberate. The charges placed to wound but not kill. The silence in high-risk zones. The way he hesitates not when danger rises, but when it doesn’t.

Nova operates like he’s allergic to peace. Or like it’s a lie he’s not willing to help tell.

I’ve reviewed the logs a dozen times. Each event seems chaotic until you step back. Then the alignment appears — method behind spectacle. Surgery behind carnage. He’s not just reacting. He’s composing

And I’m following it. Like a story with missing pages. Like I’ve already read the end and just can’t remember what it said.

This case could break my career wide open. Nova is the kind of myth the Board pretends doesn’t exist. If I crack this — if I drag him into the light — they’ll have to look. They’ll have to answer.

But I don’t know if I want them to.

I used to think I was investigating a killer. Now I’m starting to wonder if I’m dancing around the edge of something older. Something that learned how to wear skin. Something that smiles because it knows the end of the story already.

I used to think the danger of obsession was losing sight of objectivity. That it made you biased. I get it now. That’s not the risk.

The risk is that obsession feels like clarity.

Sometimes I think I’m being guided. Not just by Nova — by the shape he leaves behind. By the space around him. By what’s missing.

I said in my last log I wasn’t afraid.

I lied.

I am.

And still, I can’t look away.

I won’t.

I can’t tell anyone about the message.

Already scrubbed the logs. Air-gapped the system.

Even if I wanted to, there’s no evidence. No proof.

Just seven words burned into my brain like a curse:

Blood is all they ever see.

If this is a trap, I’ve already sprung it.

That’s why I’m still here. 4:41 a.m. Dark room. Talking into a machine that doesn’t answer.

It’s curiosity.

Or maybe it's hope.

That somewhere in the blood and silence, there's something I’m supposed to understand.

Before he sends another message.

Before he comes closer.

Before I stop being the observer.

[END UNAUTHORIZED LOG – ENTRY 2]

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Marked for Memory

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

The room stank of rust and ammonia. Three levels beneath the EIC blacksite, past rotating guards and locked steel, Dallum Ostraus sat across from what was left of Tovren Calk. Once a high-tower figure in the Darakhan Chain, now a bloated remnant with bloodied knuckles and yellowed eyes. He had the look of a man who hadn’t seen sunlight in months  but still believed a smirk could cash the debts he'd racked up.

“You here to scrape bones or dig through ghosts?” Tovren asked, smirking. His voice was a mix of greasy charm and rot.

“Tell me about the Cessari collapse. The Darakhan retaliation. The body count,” Dallum replied, his tone even. “Start with Nova. Just the facts,”  though part of him already knew this wouldn’t be clinical.

The smile faltered just slightly.

“Nova,” Tovren repeated. The smirk stayed, but something behind his eyes blinked “Stars above. I paid for a knife. He brought a goddamn plague.”

Tovren leaned back, chains rattling.

“I was running logistics, see? Darakhan wasn’t a gang, he said. It was a ‘business cooperative.’ Trade networks. Off-world labor. Mutual agreements.”

“Trafficking. Extortion. Forced conscription,” Dallum corrected.

Tovren waved a lazy hand. “Call it what you like. Cessari started sniffing in our zones. Getting bold. I needed the upper tier cleaned out. Quietly. Three names. That was the deal. Send a message, shake the tree. No more."

"Nova wasn’t my first pick, but he came with reputation and flair. Had this way of joking about things that weren’t funny. Not to me, anyway. But he made it feel like he got the joke before anyone else did. Like the world was one long, dangerous punchline only he knew how to time. 

I won’t lie — if things had gone differently, I’d have kept him around. He understood danger. Knew how to navigate it. Made you feel like the room was a puzzle only he could solve. Maybe I should’ve known but I liked that. Thought it meant control. Thought I could hold the leash. Turns out it was wired to my own throat.”

He paused, licking his cracked lips.

“So I gave him the job, thought the tree would be pruned without any issues. I was trying to be surgical. However, Nova didn’t just shake it. He burned it. Roots and all. Killed the targets, sure. But he didn’t stop there. Two dozen gone in the first sweep. Some of my own people, collateral damage. Cleanup, maybe. But he never said a word.”

Dallum made no reaction.

“So I pulled back payment, I thought I was in control,” Tovren went on. “Didn’t see the point in tossing creds at someone who didn’t know when to stop sharpening. Thought maybe he’d disappear, like most contractors.”

He laughed, dry and hollow.

“Thought it was over. Thought wrong. He came back the next night like I still owed him something he didn’t know how to spend,” The words slipped out thinner now, his voice fraying at the edges. “Hit one of our safehouses. No blasters. Just knives. Close-up work. Real personal.”

He shifted in his chair, eyes unfocused, as if trying to blur the memory back into shadow.

“I heard the first scream and thought it was a prank. Then I smelled blood. Fresh. Hot. Like copper and fire. He didn’t kick down the door. Didn’t shout. Just appeared.”

Tovren’s fingers curled around the edge of the table, knuckles whitening. “My top enforcer was gutted. Not shot — opened. Others too. All fast. All quiet. No drones. No uplinks. Just hands and steel. And then he was standing there, watching.”

“He didn’t kill everyone. Left a few of us alive. Torn up bad, but breathing. Me included. Like we were supposed to carry it with us. Like it wasn’t punishment. Planting a memory.”

His voice dropped low, rough with something halfway between awe and terror.

“He didn’t say a word. Not one. Moved like the air got thinner just to make room for him. Looked me in the eye before he left and smiled. Not like a threat. Like I was next, but he hadn’t decided yet. Like it wasn’t up to him — not entirely.”

Tovren went quiet for a beat. The overhead light buzzed.

“You want to know what he left behind? What he carved into the goddamn floor?”

Dallum looked up.

“Bodies littered the ground, drained slow. Blood down the stairwells like runoff from something industrial. No panic. No haste. Just… precision. As if someone had mapped it out beforehand. Like the scene mattered more than the message.”

Dallum let the silence settle, but the questions didn't. There was another voice — one caught in the rubble. One found in the files of his holoscreen back at the office. 

Dallum leaned back, then forward again. Another thread. Another set of eyes. He couldn’t stop pulling.

Archive footage. Trauma ward. The testimony was dated six months ago, sealed and mostly redacted. An orphan, age unclear. Cessari, but not by blood. In the report there was a listed 30 children recovered from the incident. 

The voice was calm. Too calm. Like the fear had frozen and never thawed. Not gone just... stored somewhere too deep to reach.

“There was a meeting. My father said it was important. A warning for someone. I wasn’t supposed to be awake.”

The child’s face was blurred, but their posture was stiff. Still.

“First there was screaming. Loud. Sharp. Then smoke. And then… him. Not fast. Not loud. Just moving. Like he already knew who was supposed to die.”

They paused. Dallum heard faint beeping from a monitor in the background.

“He didn’t look at the bodyguards. Not even when they fired. Like their bullets were as meaningless to him as their names. He didn’t dodge. Didn’t hide. He just… kept walking. Like the bullets hadn’t been invented yet Or like they didn’t matter if they hit him.

We weren’t allowed to run in there. The gold tiles scratched easy. Mama said they were ‘imported. The estate’s front parlor. A place that once held marble statues and ornate drinking urns, now covered in red."

The child blinked. A long, slow blink.

"Then he saw me. Stopped. Looked. Not a twitch in his hand, not a breath wasted. He just watched me. Like he saw something he wasn't expecting — or maybe something he'd seen before. We stared at each other for what felt like forever. Like reflections. Like silence held us still. Something passed between us in that quiet, something that didn’t break but… hardened. His face didn’t change. But the air did. Like death didn’t happen around him. It happened through him.

And then he moved.

He turned away from me. not hurried, not unsure. Just turned. And that’s when it happened. The sounds came back. The rhythm of death. Screams. Footsteps. Collapse.

He cleared the estate. Systematic. Everyone but my siblings below. maybe he just didnt find them... but Leadership. Enforcers. Anyone who could point a gun or give an order. they all died.

He shot my uncle through the eye. Then my cousin. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even flinch.

And I just stood there. I remember the smell more than the screams. Burned silk. Gun oil. And something sharp, like when wires get too hot. Still breathing. Still standing. 

I don’t know why he stopped. I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me too. But sometimes… I think he did it because I was there. Because I watched."

That line chilled Dallum more than anything.

He read deeper. Found the footnote. Cessari had a history of grooming child operatives. Indoctrination started at nine According to the footnote, training often began with controlled witnessing exposure to violence. This child’s file flagged them for preliminary conditioning.

Nova hadn’t spared a child. He’d interrupted a process.

Dallum stared at the files for a long time.

Tovren called it overkill. A vendetta. A message. The orphan called it fate. Precision. Inevitability.

He scribbled notes, half-legible.

Could be rules. Could be mercy masquerading as violence. Or violence dressed as mercy. Could be something worse — selection.

He played Tovren’s audio again. Listened to the desperate mirth trying to cover shaking hands. Then played the orphan’s clip, watching the child sit perfectly still as the past rolled over them.

Nova hadn’t killed randomly. He hadn’t spared out of mercy. Everything was deliberate. Everything with purpose.

He thought back to the moment Nova froze in Kie-Mara’s vault  that flicker of something old. To Rael Luc’s heist. To Syla’s stammering calm. Each one a piece. Each one almost making sense. Zenth flagged Nova’s sudden silence in a bar, saying the man who never shut up suddenly had nothing to say. That was the strangest part. Then there was Rael Luc’s retelling. how Nova twisted the job midstream, vanished into old archives with that thousand-yard silence and never returned the same. 

This wasn’t chaos. It was surgery. Even the parts that looked like madness, the charge, the spectacle, the dripping stairs were cut with intent. Pieces are there but the connection is still missing. Nova’s movements are impulsive, but the results are not.

He wasn’t just avoiding patterns. He was writing one.

“He cut the head off a snake,” Dallum murmured, “but he burned the ground it slithered on.”

He started compiling the final report.

He felt it before he saw it — a flicker. Lights dimmed, just for a moment. He sat up straighter.

Another clue.

He launched a trace. Fingers moved on instinct.

Then: firewall crash. Terminal locked.

No network. No connection.

He felt the warmth leave the room.

The silence felt shaped. A silence with weight. Watching back.

This wasn’t information.

It was presence.

The screen pinged.

Encrypted file. No sender. No return trace.

Just a message:

Blood is all they ever see.

Dallum froze. At first — a rush. Triumph, maybe. The thrill of another breadcrumb. A crack in the veil.

He launched a trace, fingers flying.

Then everything dropped. hard and silent. Firewall crash. Signal gone. Cold sweat followed. The glow of the terminal bathed his face in pale light, but the warmth was gone.

Then it hit him.

The terminal wasn’t connected.

This system was closed.

Dallum turned his head. Slow. Mechanical.

The door was still locked.

But something had changed.

The air wasn’t still. The silence felt shaped. Pressed. Focused.

Like the room was listening back.

He stared at the screen. At the words. At their weight. Not a warning. Not a threat.

An answer.

And suddenly, Dallum wasn’t sure who the question belonged to.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Debts and Dues

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The holding cell lights buzzed faintly overhead, casting a clinical sheen over the metal table between Dallum and Rael Luc. Rael was already slouched back in their chair, arms crossed, expression sour. The kind of person who looked like they’d lost more than they’d ever had to begin with. Their left eye was cybernetic and twitching slightly. A  leftover from an old blast never properly repaired. Their records were thick with theft, forgery, digital intrusion, and a long list of failed cons. But today, Rael had agreed to cooperate. Reluctantly. In exchange for a plea deal on a much newer set of charges.

"Let’s just get this over with," Rael muttered before Dallum could even hit record.

"Tell me about the heist. The one with Icarus Nova. Orzen Asset Recovery Bureau. Just over a year ago I believe."

Rael grunted, clearly uncomfortable. "You want that story? Of all the damn names, you’re asking about him? Stars... I said I’d talk, not that I’d like it. Just know, Nova’s not some misunderstood mastermind. He’s chaos with a smirk. Dangerous. Unreliable. And worse than that — he’s bored."

Dallum made a note.

"Look, I never planned to work with him. Nobody sane plans to. But this job, it meant something. These debt brokers were bleeding whole colonies dry. They buried my people in numbers and interest. Nobody came to stop it. Not the EIC. Not anyone. Orzen’s got their claws in half the fringe sectors — mine included. I wasn’t just chasing a payday. I wanted to hurt them. I knew their routes, their weak spots. I’d been planning it for months. And then Nova showed up."

Dallum raised a brow. "How did he get involved?"

"Heard about it through someone. Don't know who. He just appeared one day with that half-grin and said he liked the plan. Said he wanted in. You can try saying no to Nova. But it’s worse if you do.”

And you know what? For someone that smug — always grinning, always coasting — the bastard worked like a ghost with a blueprint. Never shut up, always spouting nonsense or jokes, like none of it mattered — but underneath? Every move calculated. He planned like a tactician wrapped in a drunk’s disguise. Almost made me respect him. Almost. If he didn’t have a reputation for blood and chaos, if this job hadn’t gone sideways the way it did... maybe then."

Rael leaned forward now, voice rising.

"And at first — stars, it was going well. Sure, he had the codes — but the way he moved? Like he could smell the weak spots. Slipped through blind corners and security gaps I hadn’t even clocked. just unnervingly good at reading places. Like the walls whispered to him. He wasn’t even nervous. That’s what threw me."

Rael’s face darkened. He stared at the table for a second. 'But then we passed this old display in one of the security wings. AI units from the war — blank eyes, rusted cores, the kind of junk that barely escapes the scrapyard. He stopped. Just… froze. No reason I could see. Like something hit him all at once. Maybe it meant something to him. Maybe it was nothing. But whatever it was, it shifted the whole damn energy."

Dallum sat forward, intrigued.

"You think it meant something to him?"

"I think it broke something in him. Started talking under his breath — not to me, not to anyone. Just got real quiet. Like he forgot I was there. Then out of nowhere, he tweaked the plan. he said we needed to ‘check the archives.’ Tried to play it off like it was part of the original job, but I could tell something had shifted. I pushed back, told him it was a terrible idea, that straying would get us both caught. But he kept going. Said there was something down there for my cause. Like he cared. Like I couldn’t tell he was just buying time.. Made it sound like he was doing me a favor. 

We headed down this corridor filled with locked labs and old server cores. And that’s when he changed again. I couldn’t hear anything, but Nova? He stopped like he'd been yanked out of reality. Stared ahead, still, like he was listening to something only meant for him. Something distant. Or close. I don’t know. But his whole vibe shifted. Like something bigger than either of us had just stepped into the room, and only he could see it. Like he wasn’t even seeing the room anymore, just whatever was behind it.

He tried to hide it, acted like he was still with me, still playing by the plan. But I think he knew exactly what he was doing. I think he knew something was coming. He didn’t want me in the way. Like whatever was coming, I wasn’t supposed to see it. I told him we needed to leave, but he was already moving, pulling doors, scanning walls. Said he found some old logs, handed me a few storage sticks, claimed they might help my cause. Kept acting like this was still about the heist. But I could see it wasn’t. Not really. He was looking for something else. Something that had nothing to do with debtors or paydays or justice.Whatever it was, it rewrote the job and left me out of it.."

Rael sat back, looking exhausted by the memory.

"Told him I was done. I was getting to the jump window before it all came down. But then everything went to hell. Figures, doesn’t it? He had to screw it up. Or maybe he wanted to. Alarms blared. Chaos hit like a wave. Then came the worst part — they didn’t just arrive; they poured in. Armed responders, private security, even a few contractors with blank-badge armor. Not fast. Not clumsy. Like they’d already been stationed nearby, just waiting for something. Waiting for us. I thought it was just bad luck — trip a silent alarm, get swarmed. maybe one of the secondary doors, or a pressure sensor. Happens.”

Rael didn’t say it out loud, but the timing lingered with Dal as he listened. The way Nova froze earlier. The way he rerouted the plan. The way he got Rael out first. Nova hadn’t tripped anything — he’d seen it coming. Somehow. And he hadn’t warned Rael, only moved to keep him clear.

Rael, of course, didn’t put it together. Wouldn’t. Maybe couldn’t. But Dallum did.

“I was disoriented, couldn’t tell which route was clear, but Nova, he didn’t hesitate. Told me to double back through the old vent shaft we’d bypassed earlier. Said it was still clear. I didn’t argue — just ran. I think he stayed behind to cover the path. Maybe to buy time. Maybe to grab whatever the hell he came for. 

I don’t know. But when I looked back, all I saw was smoke. Whole damn station burned, and somehow I survived. Not that I’ll thank him for it. And Nova? He walked out of the smoke like he was a part of it. Something I couldn’t see. Something he shouldn’t have had. I don’t know what it was and I don’t want to."

Dallum tapped his stylus against the pad, eyes narrowing.

"You think he planned it?"

"He didn’t give a damn. Not about the job. Not about me. Not about anything but whatever he walked out with.”

Later, Dal reviewed a brief field note attached to the report — a survivor testimony logged by an accountant handler named Elaro Prish. It was short and fragmented, recorded mid-evacuation:

"Fire everywhere. Something in the lower labs exploded. Saw a man walk out of the blaze — purple hair, metal arm, something glowing in his chest or his coat Faint, pulsing blue. Almost rhythmic. Like it was alive. I don’t know. Not a scratch on him. I hid. I didn’t breathe. He never looked back."

Dallum closed the file slowly. From the outside, it almost looked like Nova had saved Rael’s life. But Rael couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it that way. Too bitter. Too burned.

Nova’s story wasn’t in what they saw. It was in what none of them understood

He filed a final note under the report:

Possible psychological trigger: old military tech. Cross-reference AI war deployments with Nova sightings.

Dallum leaned back, staring at the screen like it might flinch. He’d reviewed the interview three times now trying to scan for more answers. Nova had chosen something else. Something unknown. Over money, over allies, over survival. And that meant one of two things: he was chasing something sacred. Or, something terrifying. That was the part that wouldn't leave Dallum alone.

And then, underneath it, another note. Personal. Not part of the file.

What did he take?

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

[BEGIN UNAUTHORIZED LOG – ENTRY 1]

This is Investigator Dallum Ostraus.

I’ve decided to start logging off the record. Nothing official. No chain of review, no handlers breathing down my neck. Just me, trying to make sense of a case that doesn’t make any.

I’ve reviewed the footage. The testimonies. I’ve heard the fear in their voices—Syla, Zenth, Pax. I’ve watched Nova shoot a man and walk through a storm of blaster fire like he was untouchable. I’ve seen what he leaves behind. And I still don’t understand him. Not really. Not even close.

I’ve chased dead ends across half a dozen systems. Ghost trails. Static-riddled footage. An abandoned ship two years cold, held together with parts from a war that ended years ago. Every time I get close, he’s already gone. It's like he knows when I’m watching. Like he wants me chasing my own tail.

I don’t know where he’s going. I don’t even know where he’s been.

The bar shooting on Tarnas Moon was the freshest lead we’ve had in weeks. And even with full forensics on site, we’ve hit the same wall. The victim’s blood matches. Confirmed ID. But the other sample, the one we’re sure belongs to Nova, gets flagged by every system but doesn’t tie to anything. No citizen profile. No medical logs. No criminal record pre-appearance. It’s like trying to trace smoke through a mirror.

But it’s him. The markers match the profile we’ve been building. Same anomaly signatures. Same trace compound patterns found in older augmentation lines. It’s him.

Just… no past.

And that’s what’s eating at me. He didn’t exist before three years ago. Not officially. Not biologically. That’s what the database says. And the database is supposed to be law.

I’m supposed to be good at this. Pattern recognition. Pressure points. Habits. Behavioral profiles are my specialty. But he doesn’t have any. He shows up, does the job, vanishes. One planet to the next. Violence follows him like a scent trail.

And I keep thinking—if I’d worked faster, dug deeper, flagged him sooner—Jerrit Sal might still be alive. He was not even a threat. A man who died doing the decent thing. And I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even see it coming. Nova’s tracks are messy and lead in too many directions. One man shouldn't be this hard to pin down. 

But everyone has personal ties.

So I’m going to start digging through the back channels. Old contacts. Off-grid intel. We’ve got field analysts in at least three sectors who owe me a favor. One of them’s bound to have seen him up close—closer than I’ve been able to get.

Maybe there’s someone out there who actually knows Icarus Nova. Someone he hasn’t left bleeding on the floor. Zenth proved that there are at least a few people who have interacted with Nova. Surely there are more than acquaintances somewhere. 

If I can find that person, I might finally have a thread to pull.

Because this? Right now? It’s not justice. It’s cleanup. And I’m tired of following the blood. [END UNAUTHORIZED LOG – ENTRY 1]

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: Bar Myths

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Dallum had barely gotten halfway through his synth coffee when the next case file landed in his queue with an urgent tag. He had only just begun digesting the contents of the Syla Ventris testimony, still reeling from the calm terror in her voice. But the timestamp on this report caught his eye, it was mere days ago. Fresh.

File #: Incident Report — Sector 9, Bar 7A, Tarnas Moon. Incident Type: Civilian Harm. Multiple Witnesses. One Fatality. Suspected Individual: Icarus Nova.

Dallum’s brows furrowed as he leaned forward, flipping through the file. Witness testimonies, camera footage, injury reports, even grainy images of a blood-slicked bar floor. It didn’t feel like a myth anymore. Nova wasn’t just some ghost who haunted ruins. He was here. Real. Bleeding and making others bleed.

Two names stood out in the report queue — Zenth Areman and Pax Xoltin.

Dal opened Zenth’s first. The transcript was labeled cooperative but rambling.

Zenth Areman appeared mid-thirties, travel-worn, the kind of man who had long stopped being surprised by violence but still hadn’t grown numb to it. His tone during the interview was casual, almost nostalgic.

Dal opened Zenth’s first. The transcript was labeled cooperative but rambling.

Zenth Areman appeared mid-thirties, travel-worn, the kind of man who had long stopped being surprised by violence but still hadn’t grown numb to it. His tone during the interview was casual, almost nostalgic—though his eyes told a different story. There was weight behind them. A tension he hadn’t shaken.

“I’ve seen him off and on for about two years, yeah. We both move around a lot for work. We cross paths every now and then. Always in places like this. Bars, ports, dead-end stations. Nova’s… hard to miss. Guy drinks like he’s got something eating him from the inside. Strong stuff, always. You ever seen someone try to drink themselves out of existing? That’s him. Real polite, real intense — until you say something he don’t like. Then it’s all heat and blaster flash.”

Zenth laughed, but it was thin. Forced.

“He’s pulled a blaster on me twice. Once ‘cause I asked him what ‘Icarus’ meant. Just a joke, y’know? The other time, I tried to talk him out of taking a job on some research vessel. Didn’t even say no—just looked at me like I’d said something sacred and wrong. Both times, he cooled off. Eventually. Never pulled the trigger. Not on me, anyway. But the look in his eye? Made my blood run cold.”

Dal typed a brief note: Temper control possibly situational. Seems to choose his violence.

Zenth leaned forward during the recording, rubbing at a scar on his forearm as he continued, voice tighter now.

“Tonight was different. He was worse. Drunker than I’ve ever seen him. Sloppy. He didn’t even talk when I sat next to him—just stared into his glass, like the bottom held something he didn’t want to face. That was weird, too. Nova usually never shuts up, even when he’s not saying anything that makes sense. Half the time he rambles about tech, or old ships, or weird stuff he’s seen out in the fringe. But that night? Nothing. Just silence. Like he’d already left the room and left his body behind.”

“Pax noticed it too. She always does—sharp as they come. Good people. She came over, real polite, told him he’d had enough. I saw it, saw the shift in him, the way his posture changed. His hand drifted low—too casual to be casual. I’ve seen him go for that blaster before.”

Zenth swallowed hard in the video.

“I tried to get between them. Put a hand on his arm, real gentle, like I was steadying him. Told him she was just doing her job, that we could go somewhere else, keep drinking, talk about anything he wanted. I kept my voice soft, like you'd talk to a wild animal you don’t want to spook.”

“He didn’t even look at me at first. Just stared at her like she was an equation he hadn’t solved yet. Then he said something—real quiet. ‘You don’t cut off the dead.’ That’s all. He was clearly too drunk to think straight, I- I tried to speak again but by then his hand twitched toward the holster.”

Zenth broke eye contact with the camera.

“I didn’t wait around after that. I ducked behind the counter, stayed low. Didn’t hear the shot right away, just shouting and the noise turning inside out. I didn’t want to be the next one on the floor.”

Dal marked another note: Zenth fled. Fear confirmed despite personal connection.

Dallum opened Pax Xoltin’s file next. Her report was flagged as distressed. She was clearly shaken. Her transcript included periods of rambling, disassociation, but the fear was crystal clear.

Her posture in the recording was stiff, arms folded tightly across her chest as if trying to keep herself together by force. Her voice wavered from the start.

“He was already three deep in something heavy before I even noticed. Just sat there, quiet, breathing like he forgot how. I didn’t even realize it was him at first. Looks different in person. Smaller, maybe. Or just… more tired. Like he’s unraveling from the inside out.”

She wiped at her eyes but kept speaking.

“I came over like I always do. Friendly but firm. Told him the drinks he was ordering were too strong to keep serving. That I had a responsibility to keep the bar safe. I saw Zenth trying to calm him down—he even touched his arm, whispering something I couldn’t hear. I thought it was working. I thought it was under control. But then Nova turned to me. Didn’t say a word. Didn’t blink. Just raised the blaster like it was the most natural thing in the world.”

Dal watched the footage in silence. The flare of light, the screams, the blur of people scattering.

“I still don’t know why I’m alive,” Pax whispered. “When he turned the blaster on me, it felt like the room slowed down. Like I was frozen in place while everything else moved around me. I saw the light hit the metal. I remember thinking: this is it. This is how it ends.”

Her voice cracked, and she took a sharp breath.

“Then Jerrit — Jerrit stepped in at the last second. I didn’t even see him move. One moment it was just me and that blaster, and the next, Jerrit was there. He must’ve been watching from his usual spot and saw what was coming. He lunged across the floor, knocked into me hard enough to rattle my teeth — and then he dropped. Took the hit. Dropped right in front of me. One of my regulars. He always sat by the window.”

She looked away from the camera, voice trembling.

“He was just trying to push me out of the way.”

Dal noted: Victim: Jerrit Sal. Fatality confirmed. Survived by brother, Dren Sal.

Pax continued, barely audible now.

“Everything went to hell. People screaming, pulling weapons. I didn’t know so many people carried blasters until they all started firing. I saw him get hit — Nova — dead-center in the chest. The blast hit hard enough to knock a full-grown man off his feet. Anyone else would've dropped, maybe died. But him? He barely flinched. Just… winced, like something had brushed past him. Then he kept moving — steady, deliberate, like nothing vital had been struck. Not a stumble. Not a sound. Just pushed through the panicked crowd like a specter passing through smoke. I don't know how. I don't think anyone does. But it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t human.”

She took a long breath, trying to ground herself.

“I kept thinking about my little reedrat at home. He waits by the window every night. He doesn’t know what danger is, not really. He just watches for me, like I’m the whole universe. And I—

I don’t know what would’ve happened to him if I hadn’t made it back. Or the bar. Or the staff. Or the regulars. It’s all just noise in my head now. I keep hearing the shot. Seeing Jerrit fall. That look on Nova’s face—like we were nothing. Like killing me wouldn’t have cost him anything at all.

What if he comes back?”

Dal stared at the transcript, the words swimming.

Dal tapped through the report from Dren Sal, brother of the deceased. The bitterness was sharp enough to sting through the text.

“My brother’s dead because the EIC can’t keep one man off the streets. You want details? He bled out in my arms. You should’ve caught Nova before he ever made it to Tarnas. You want to know what kind of man you're chasing? He walked into a bar like it was already a war zone. Didn’t care who got in the way. Didn’t care who lived or died. You call that a man? He’s something else. You should be scared of him. We all should.”

Dal sat back, silent. The evidence was overwhelming. Testimony, footage, blood. It was messier than Syla’s story. Less ghost, more grim reality. And somehow, more monstrous.

And Dallum felt it—not just the horror of what happened, but the weight of it pressing down on his shoulders. It was his case now. His responsibility. He was supposed to find this man, stop him before something like this could happen again. But he was too slow. Too buried in red tape, civil complaints, half-coded scraps of surveillance.

He rubbed at his temple, jaw tight. The names in the report blurred momentarily—Jerrit Sal, Pax Xoltin, Dren Sal—and behind them, a growing list of people that might still be alive if someone, if he, had gotten ahead of this.

He stared at the paused image of Nova at the bar — blurred, mid-motion, eyes glassy with drink but posture too deliberate for a drunkard. Something else moved behind those eyes. Something cold. Something calculating. Something that wasn’t running from death — it was dragging it along behind him.

Dallum leaned forward, jaw clenched.

What is he trying to drown? Who else would drown with him?

Dal didn’t have an answer. Not yet.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: The Hollow Trail

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The footage from Syla Ventis’s interview played on loop behind him, her voice fading into the soft hum of a data filter running on four separate monitors. It had been hours since he finished the report, but something about her story wouldn’t let him go. Not just the fear, not the near-death experience — it was the ship.

He froze the holostill again: Nova’s rust-riddled vessel looming in the backdrop of grainy atmospheric footage, patched and stitched together like it had been resurrected from a graveyard. Dallum leaned closer, enhancing a portion of the undercarriage. He was hoping for something — a registry number, a flagged component, even a ship class he could cross-reference. Nothing.

Everything about the ship screamed old — not retro, not repurposed. Ancient. Outdated propulsion fins. A mechanical boarding ramp with no modern seal. Wiring patterns that hadn’t been standard in half a century. If it flew, it did so by spite and luck.

He pulled up a list of known derelicts and battlefield flighters from the Olympus-Chronos conflict. It took three calls to the EIC’s Naval Debris Records Office before someone gave him a direct line to a fleet historian.

The woman on the call — Dr. Elryn Vasto — blinked at the image Dal sent her, then frowned.

“Where’d you get this?” she asked.

“Field witness. Outer sector.”

Vasto leaned in, the glow of her interface casting a ghost light over her features. “That’s not a civilian build. That’s repurposed military. Probably Olympus-aligned, pre-collapse. I’ve seen a few like it in scrap fields, but none in this condition. If someone’s flying it… they’re either incredibly skilled or incredibly desperate.”

Dallum narrowed his eyes. “Any ID codes visible?”

“Scrubbed. You can see where the hull was scorched over — probably burned it off intentionally.”

Dal muttered under his breath. “Why go through that kind of trouble?”

Dr. Vasto looked directly at him. “Because they don’t want to be found.”

“Look anyways,” Dal insists. 

Dallum cross-checked the visible exterior plating. Some panels bore the signature seamwork of Chronos salvage — pieces stripped from lunar wrecks. Others, Olympus plating, possibly taken from a downed courier or long-abandoned scout. Nothing matched in full.

The ship wasn’t just old. It was wrong. It shouldn’t fly, and yet it did. 

Dal leaned back in his chair, tension tight in his shoulders.

But he couldn’t stop now.

He opened a secondary terminal and began combing through regional logs from the last two years — border scans, station docking records, salvage permits. Anything. The name Nova rarely came up, and when it did, it was hearsay at best — a drunk spacer’s story, a corrupted audio log, a rumor passed from port to port like an old song no one remembered the start of.

Still, Dal marked each one. Patterns mattered.

He pulled up a salvage incident logged in Sector Varnis-7 — no criminal charges, just a flagged disturbance in the wreckage orbiting an old Chronos war relic. The sensor data showed a vessel docking for forty-seven minutes, then vanishing again. No registry. No confirmed visuals. But there was a signature buried in the debris scan — faint radiation spike, matching a profile the EIC had seen before.

Nova’s profile.

It was almost nothing. But almost nothing was more than Dal had an hour ago.

He followed that up with a report from a mining platform on Lethros Drift. One of the workers claimed someone had broken into the engineering core and rerouted coolant for a personal project. No footage. No fingerprints. Just a jagged hole in the floor and a long trail of questions. The platform admin had dismissed it as an internal prank. Dal flagged it for re-review.

It wasn’t just the lack of data that unsettled him — it was the shape of it. Gaps where someone should’ve been caught. Clean exits. No one was that careful.

Unless they wanted to disappear.

A few days into Dallum’s scouring of early rumors and supposed sightings, EIC scouts finally found it — Nova’s ship. Or what was left of it.

It had been abandoned in low orbit around a moonless rock on the fringe of Pilousian Galaxy’s space. No life signs. No heat signature. Just a cold shell drifting like space debris. Based on deterioration, the tech team estimated it had been sitting empty for close to just over two years ago, an estimated eight months or so after Syla's encounter based on the scans.

Dal had it dragged in and scrubbed for every scrap of evidence, but the result was a bust. Whatever traces of Nova had once lingered, they were long since erased or decayed. Wiped clean.

Still, he couldn’t let it go.

Dal opened a new file and titled it simply: The Hollow Trail.

He pulled up another data pool, communications logs from listening stations on the edge of Concord space. Most were garbled noise or standard transit requests, but one caught his eye: a message flagged months ago for unusual signal interference. He clicked it open.

The feed was broken, static-laced. But for a few seconds, an eye-patched figure stared directly into the lens — face distorted, unreadable — before the connection cut out entirely.

Dal checked the timestamp. It matched a date linked to one of Nova’s rumored stops.

His pulse quickened.

Was it Nova? Or someone sending a message on his behalf?

The idea burrowed deeper: What if Nova wasn’t just slipping past the EIC… what if he was watching them? Watching him?

Dal felt his skin crawl. This was starting to feel like a ghost story told in digital echoes. But he wasn’t listening anymore.

He was part of it.

This wasn’t a ghost story anymore.

Nova was real.

[dustedstarsfall]

Fragments: To Catch a Ghost

part 1 part 2

Dallum Ostraus is an ambitious young man. From his first day at the Intergalactic Enforcement Concord he knew he would become something great. Someday, he’d run the Concord, break a big case, make the galaxy cluster safer, more efficient, better than ever before.. It didn't matter that the days were long. Or that the work was never ending. Or that his manager was a grouch. Or that days bled together without sleep and more paperwork and more evidence to shuffle through and more and more and– 

The holoscreen flickered with an audible BZZT in front of Dallum. His eyes had gone bleary in reading some monotonous civil case. Something about accidentally stepping onto a holy site? Or was this one the case with offensive gestures that for the defendant are endearing on their home planet? They all blur together so easily. It'd be so much easier if all planets abided by the same laws, but he supposes if it were that consistent then his work would be unnecessary. Sometimes, he wondered if that would really be so bad. 

He stretched back in his chair attempting to rub the bags out from under his eyes before sitting back up straight to view the message. His pristine buttoned up shirt is rumpled with the long day and his posture is in dire need of correcting. The synth drink that's supposed to be something like coffee but tastes closer to burnt water has gone cold by now, but he reaches over to take a drink nonetheless. It is afterall better than nothing. He ignored the gnawing thought that another dead-end case might bury his ambitions permanently beneath a stack of forgotten files

Finally after resetting himself Dal swipes on the holoscreen to open up the notification that had interrupted his mindless search. It opens to a new case: 

File #851407WC: Nova, Icarus. Wanted. 

Great. Another misunderstanding or minor planet law break that doesn't even matter in the grand scheme of things. Easy, just find the guy and have some bounty serve him the fees. At least that is the kind of case that usually accompanies such a phrase as “Wanted” around here. However when Dallum opens the file further he blinks in surprise. “Charges: Theft, forgery, disorderly conduct, multiple planetary confinement escapes, assault, robbery, conspiracy..“

Dallum continues to scroll down the line. Governing interference. He almost feels himself getting giddy. Piracy. This is it isnt it. Smuggling. Dallum sits up a little straighter. Murder. Considered Dangerous. High priority case.

Objective: EIC jurisdiction, collect evidence of crimes and whereabouts. 

Note: Who is he? Now that was odd. Who is he? What is that supposed to mean? It confuses Dallum. Of course they would know who the criminal was, he had to have papers, a home, family. Surely Dallum’s superiors just mishandled the filing. Good and easy way to move upwards. Finally. 

Dallum stood and took a small lap around his cramped office, barely containing the excitement rising in his chest. This was the kind of case he’d been waiting for.  the kind that could actually make the galaxy safer. Better. No more pointless civil disputes or jurisdictional misunderstandings. No more filing away meaningless reports while waiting for something real.

This was it.

His way up.

He took a short break to ride the high — wandered out for a refill of synth coffee, exchanged a smile with Miranda Hawkins down the hall, and let the buzz of it all settle just enough to refocus. Then he returned, sat back down, and squared his shoulders.

The real work started now.

He opens up the filing to get a basic understanding of what he is to tackle. Scrolling past all the criminal charges.  Icarus Nova. The name suggests some kind of alias, perhaps olympian in origin. They do love their old stories. Perhaps this man is still stuck within the conflict that ended less than a decade ago. That may explain why the case appears so messy to Dal’s superiors. Dallum is unphased. He pulls up a few holoviews of the man he is chasing. Snippets from cameras catching, or witness accounts aid the visual rendering to create a more clear image. 

Icarus Nova is a lean, scrappy figure with an unmistakable air of chaotic confidence. He sports bright, messy purple hair often swept back or tousled beneath a pair of worn goggles perched on his head.. Dallum notes this as potentially Oorthborn, Kestranni perhaps? Comet peoples, nomadic and stoic. Dallum begins a scan of records on another monitor to attempt to find a match to this hypothesis as he continues observing.

One eye is hidden behind a simple black eyepatch, while his working eye is a sharp, restless green that gleams with mischievous intelligence. His face is marked by old burn scars and cybernetic implants, hints of patchwork repairs that speak of past explosions, brawls, and near-death encounters. His left arm is fully mechanical, sleek but mismatched with exposed conduits glowing faintly in neon hues. Unsurprising details considering the kind of work Nova takes on in his criminal pursuits. However Dallum is curious about Icarus Nova’s eye. Seeing as the man has other cybernetic augmentations, why pass up one to vital. 

He often wears a long, weather-beaten coat over layered shirts and tactical harnesses, glowing wires and small blinking lights woven into his gear. A battered respirator scarf with a skull design sometimes obscures his grin, a grin that's often there, half-mocking, half-thrilled, as though every gunfight is a game. It makes Dallum uneasy. Silently he is glad he is not a bounty hunter who may have to encounter Nova in person. 

Dallum turns to the searches he had put onto the other monitors, to see if any matches appear within the database. One big problem becomes readily apparent. Icarus Nova only showed up three years ago. That certainly cannot be right, everyone has a trail- they don't just appear. But no. No paper trail. No explanation. The man had just… appeared.. This is going to be a much more difficult task than Dallum had first believed. He will have to investigate manually. He bites down on the bubbling frustration and replaces it with a new determination. Where else to start but the first report, surely there is a direction from there. He sighs and settles in his seat, prepared for another unending torrent of skimming through evidence. At least this time the contents are sure to be more riveting than some unimportant civil dispute, he takes comfort in that at least. Dallum scrolls back through the files to find the first encounter the EIC has in the database.

File #90578RE: Ventris, Syla. Scavenger. Strange encounter. Icarus Nova mentioned. First report.

Dallum knew the kind of work she did. Most of the battlefield wreckage hadn’t even cooled before the salvage licenses started flowing. Five years wasn’t enough time to bury what the Olympus-Chronos war left behind — or who it left behind. Centuries of conflict aren't so quickly cleared up.

The file opened to an interview recording. Syla Ventris sat stiffly, clearly uncomfortable yet defiant in her makeshift armor, scrap metal braided into her hair. A nameless voice prompted:

“Please recount your experience, Miss Ventris. Provide all details you remember. The EIC will investigate.”

Syla shifted, uneasy but resolute. With pride tempered by wary tension, she began:

“It started normal. Me and my crew were working a trackage site, gathering scrap and old chips. Sites like that—wrecked warships, old bodies drifting—they whisper memories if you listen. Usually, we don't bother reporting stuff to authorities. Ain’t exactly doing sanctioned work. But this job, it felt different. Quiet, easy, until he showed up.”

Didn't notice him right away. His ship was rusted scrap itself, blended right in with the twisted metal and debris floating out there. Crew figured him for a ghost at first—stupid stories you hear among wreckage. Ghost ships, phantom crews—yeah, we’ve all heard it. Just rumors. We laughed it off. Mostly.”

“But then my second, Jarren Lang, he finds me halfway wedged under some hull, eyes wide like he’d seen a real ghost, says some guy just walked outta this ancient rust bucket like it was a casual stroll.” Syla paused, eyes narrowed fiercely. "They weren't even sure if the man was real.. I am not fool enough to believe in such things as ghosts.The wreckages, they always hold memories y'know. Sometimes you can even scrape them off the data chips. See some folks working the ships in a time none of us remember, but those ghosts are always on a screen. This one was walking right alongside us.”

“We watched him awhile. This ship he had was older than my grandfather, bolts loose, wiring sparking like stars, engines sputtering like it was gasping for breath. Thought he was some idiot conned by a junker, ripe for picking. "So we confronted him—real confident, y'know? Big mistake. Thought he was just some clueless scavenger, easy prey.”

“But the way he turned around, slow-like, barely acknowledging us, should’ve been a warning. He had this calm about him, bored almost, like we were just an interruption, pests he didn't feel like dealing with. Before we knew what happened, he'd tapped something on that rusted panel, ancient tech none of us even knew how to boot up. Next thing we know, we're sealed in this old airlock—doors slammed shut so hard it shook our bones.”

“The oxygen gauge dropped halfway in an instant. We were gasping, dizzy, panic clawing up our throats. None of us knew how to override it, especially not on gear this old. He didn’t even bother to watch at first; just went back to calmly working on his ship while we pounded and pleaded, our breaths growing shallower. Every so often, he'd glance over and lecture us, all casual-like, about how you shouldn’t threaten strangers unless you're prepared to back up your talk.”

“Could’ve killed us without breaking a sweat, without even trying,” Syla’s voice tightens, like she is almost offended at how easy it was for Nova, “ It was… terrifying. I ain't ashamed to say it, we thought we were dead. Eventually, when he finished whatever repairs he was making, he released the airlock like it was nothing. didn't even look back."

“Didn't even touch our scrap. Left us there shaking, gasping, like we weren't even worth the trouble.”

Syla shook her head, but the edge of bravado dulled slightly, her voice dipping lower. "I ain’t here to be some snitch, alright? I don’t trust the EIC, never have. But that guy? Nova? He scared me. And I don’t scare easy. What he did wasn’t about money or territory—it was control. He knew those old airlock systems like the back of his hand, tech even I can’t make sense of, and I make a living crawling through war wrecks. He wanted us helpless, and he made it look effortless."

She looked directly into the camera now, some mixture of pride and wariness tightening her jaw. "I just want it on record that Syla Ventris survived him. Not many can say that, I reckon. If folks are whispering his name now, give it time—they’ll be shouting it soon. Someone that dangerous? That smart? They don’t stay in the shadows forever."

The recording ended with a faint click. The air in Dal’s cramped office felt heavier, charged with something he couldn’t name. Unease? Anticipation? A grim certainty took root. This was no ordinary case. No ordinary man.

So many questions. No answers yet.

But one thing was clear: Dallum Ostraus wasn’t walking away. Not now. He would uncover the truth behind Icarus Nova—even if it killed him.

[dustedstarsfall]

Echoes of Dust

There is something about the endless expanse of space that attracts ghosts. Not the kind that haunt halls or whisper in the dark, but older ones—memories etched into dust and vacuum. A song never sung. A truth never told. But always remembered.

Even the youngest star recalls the sound the universe made when it tore itself into being. Every atom bears a scar, a memory of origin.

This galaxy cluster remembers more than most.

The war is not yet a decade buried, but the wounds stretch back centuries. Nearly three hundred years since the fleet began battle in the stars—yet Olympus and its moon Chronus have warred far longer than that.

And always, beneath it all, there was Dust.

Older than language. Deadlier than fire. Dust lingers on rare space bodies and in the dark halos of stars not yet born. No one knows why Dust settled onto Chronus soil but it did.

Long before other systems knew their names, those two bodies fought in orbit, in shadow, in blood.

Then came the Hollow Skies Treaty.

A compromise wrapped in desperation. Olympus and Chronus agreed to spare their home worlds and take the war elsewhere. Off-planet. Off-moon. Into the stars. And once it touched the void, nothing stayed untouched.

What followed was conquest masquerading as necessity. Hundreds of galaxies drawn in. Thousands of worlds shattered. Dust drifted with the fleets—whispered about in hushed voices, feared, worshiped, smuggled. Entire planets fell to it without a shot fired. Others burned trying to possess what they could never wield. The conflict became hydra-headed—waged in orbit, on planets, through trade routes, and behind closed doors. What began as a lunar civil war became the great consuming fire of an era.

It wasn’t Olympus who ended the war. Nor Chronus.

They would have bled each other dry until their stars dimmed. What stopped them wasn’t surrender or treaty, but refusal—an ultimatum whispered across systems too long used as battlegrounds.

The cluster rose up.

Not with fleets, but with unity. Planets once silent, neutral, or divided found a common voice in the aftermath. They called it the Quiet Reckoning. A coalition of scorched worlds and fractured colonies, bound not by power but exhaustion.

Trade routes were closed. Fuel lines rerouted. The black markets feeding the war began to vanish, one node at a time. Dust smugglers were turned in. Prisoners from both sides were freed without terms. Ships once loyal to Olympus or Chronus were refused entry at ports across the stars.

It wasn’t a battle. It was a turning away.

When enough worlds stopped acknowledging the war, the war had nowhere left to go.

Olympus called it betrayal. Chronus called it cowardice. But both sides began withdrawing fleets in silence. They did not resume fighting among their own lands either. The Hollow Skies Treaty remained, untouched but toothless symbolic now, of an age that had finally reached its limit.

And so peace returned. Not in glory, but in stillness. Not in triumph, but in collective exhaustion.

The Quiet Reckoning was never signed, never named by a government, never formalized. It existed only in action, in choice, in refusal.

But history would mark it as the moment the war could no longer afford itself.

Now, after centuries of blood and ash, peace has come—thin and tired, like a soldier too worn to raise his weapon again. They say the war is over. That it ended with honor.

But memory doesn’t forget so easily.

The stars still carry its echoes. And Dust still breathes in the places they cannot see.

But finally the ghosts can rest.