## The Static Bloom
The air tasted like burnt sugar and static. Not the crackle from a faulty receiver, but something deeper, coating the tongue like ash. Wren coughed, pulling the salvaged respirator tighter across her face. The filter did little, barely mitigating the phantom itch in her sinuses. Above, the twin suns bled orange into a sky fractured with ribbons of violet – the ‘Veilgrokke Tear’, Old Man Hemlock called it. A beautiful, terrifying omen.
She scanned the ruins of what had once been Port Veridia. Twisted metal skeletons clawed at the sky, choked by luminous fungal blooms pulsing with an unsettling rhythm. The biolarian echo had slammed shut three cycles ago, and everything…shifted. It wasn’t a collapse so much as a severance. A vital thread snipped, leaving chaos in its wake.
The worst wasn’t the structural damage. It was the newborns. Screaming, vacant-eyed things born with a hole where connection should be. They weren’t born *wrong*, just…untethered. The Veilgrokkke Process, the communal prenatal sharing of emotional and spatial data – gone. No shared memory. No instinctive understanding of place or belonging. Just raw, fractured sentience.
Wren adjusted the weight of the pulse rifle strapped to her back. Salvage was all that mattered now. Components, food, anything to keep the small enclave at Dustbowl functioning. She wasn’t a scientist or a healer. Just…survivable.
“Anything?” Jax’s voice crackled through her comm-bead, rough as sandpaper.
“Scrap mostly,” Wren replied, pushing aside a section of warped durasteel. “Some power cells. Not a full charge, but usable. And…something strange down by the old hydroponics bay.”
“Strange how?”
“Light. Too consistent for fungal growth. Almost…organized.”
Jax swore, a low growl in her ear. “Stay sharp. The Collectors have been bolder since the bloom.”
The air grew heavy, thick with an almost metallic scent. As Wren approached the hydroponics bay, she noticed it wasn’t light emanating *from* the structure, but pooling around it. A shimmering, iridescent haze that distorted the already fractured landscape. Within it, shapes moved – not organic, but angular and impossible.
“Jax,” she murmured, her hand tightening on the rifle’s grip. “I think I found what they’re looking for.”
A guttural shriek echoed through the ruins. Wren whirled, raising her rifle. A newborn, skin stretched taut over skeletal limbs, lunged at her from behind a toppled freighter. Its eyes were milky white, reflecting the fractured light like shattered glass.
She fired a stun burst. The newborn convulsed, collapsing to the ground. Wren didn’t bother checking for a pulse. They weren’t *dead*, not in the traditional sense. Just…empty vessels.
“They’re getting closer,” she reported, her voice tight. “Aggressive. And they seem drawn to the anomaly.”
“Head back here,” Jax commanded. “I’m bringing Kaelen. He wants to see this.”
Kaelen, the enclave’s designated ‘Sensor,’ was a mutation even among the mutated. Skin like polished obsidian, eyes that could perceive wavelengths beyond human comprehension. He claimed to feel the pulse of the broken echo. To understand what it had become.
Wren secured her equipment and moved quickly, weaving through the wreckage. The air grew colder as she neared Jax’s position. She could feel a pressure building behind her eyes, a discordant hum that vibrated in her teeth.
“What is this place?” Kaelen’s voice was low, almost reverent. He stood beside Jax, his dark eyes fixed on the anomaly.
It was larger now, a swirling vortex of colour and light that pulsed with an unnatural rhythm. Within it, shapes coalesced and dissolved – fragments of buildings, faces, landscapes that shouldn’t exist.
“It’s like…a memory,” Kaelen breathed, reaching out a hand towards the vortex. “But broken. Shattered.”
“The Collectors are coming,” Jax warned, her hand resting on the hilt of her plasma blade. “I can feel their static.”
A flicker at the edge of Wren’s vision. Then another, and another. Tall, spindly figures emerged from the shadows, their bodies composed of fractured light and swirling energy. The Collectors. Scavengers who fed on solidified anomaly, the remnants of broken realities.
“They want what’s inside,” Wren said, her voice flat. “Whatever it is.”
“They don’t understand it,” Kaelen murmured, his eyes burning with an unsettling intensity. “They just consume.”
The Collectors advanced, their movements jerky and unnatural. One of them extended a long, skeletal arm towards the vortex, its energy tendrils reaching out to grasp.
“Don’t let them touch it,” Kaelen shouted, his voice ringing with urgency. “It could destabilize everything.”
Jax launched herself forward, her plasma blade slicing through the air. The Collectors recoiled, their energy forms flickering and distorting. Wren raised her pulse rifle, firing a series of stun bursts. The Collectors shrieked, their fragmented bodies convulsing.
“It’s not working!” Jax yelled. “They don’t feel pain.”
Wren switched to overload rounds, targeting the energy nodes that pulsed within each Collector’s form. The Collectors shrieked louder, their bodies beginning to unravel.
“The anomaly is growing,” Kaelen said, his voice strained. “It’s reacting to the conflict.”
The vortex pulsed with increased intensity, throwing off waves of energy that buffeted them. Fragments of memories flashed before Wren’s eyes – a laughing child, a bustling marketplace, a star-filled sky. Images that weren’t hers.
“What is this place showing you?” Jax asked, her voice barely audible above the escalating chaos.
“Everything,” Wren replied, her eyes fixed on the vortex. “And nothing.”
One of the Collectors broke through their defenses, its energy tendrils reaching towards Kaelen. Jax intercepted it with her plasma blade, but the Collector’s energy burned through her shield.
“Kaelen!” Wren shouted, firing a series of overload rounds at the attacking Collector. The Collector shrieked, its body beginning to unravel, but it was too late.
Kaelen staggered backward, clutching his head. His obsidian skin cracked and fractured, revealing a pulsating core of energy beneath.
“The echo…” he gasped, his voice barely a whisper. “It’s flooding my senses.”
The anomaly surged with power, engulfing Kaelen in a blinding wave of light. The Collectors recoiled, their fragmented bodies flickering and distorting.
Then, silence. The light subsided, revealing Kaelen standing motionless in the center of the wreckage. His obsidian skin was smooth and unblemished, his eyes burning with an intense, otherworldly glow.
“What happened?” Jax asked, her voice trembling.
Kaelen didn’t answer. He simply raised his hand towards the anomaly, and the vortex began to shrink, its swirling energy coalescing into a single point of light.
“He’s containing it,” Wren said, her voice barely audible above the escalating chaos. “He’s absorbing it.”
“But at what cost?” Jax asked, her eyes fixed on Kaelen’s transformed form.
Kaelen turned to face them, his otherworldly eyes burning with an intensity that made Wren’s skin crawl.
“The echo is no longer broken,” he said, his voice echoing with an otherworldly power. “It is…reborn.”
He paused, his eyes sweeping over them with a chilling intensity.
“But it requires…a vessel.”
He looked directly at Wren, his eyes burning with an unsettling clarity.
“And it has chosen you.”
