Chapter 16: The Sky of Dead Stars
The ground-bridge severed spatial reality with a violent, tearing sound that tasted heavily of copper.
Gravity hit Eshiren first. It didn’t push. It crushed. Earthgon possessed a mass far exceeding Azaria, and the atmosphere compressed against his skin like the pressure at the bottom of a deep ocean. Heat radiated from the paved stone beneath his boots, a dry, oppressive warmth smelling faintly of burning ozone and molten silicate. His knees buckled under the sudden, immense weight, driving him toward the floor.
He caught himself. Barely.
Locking his joints, Eshiren forced his recovering core to flood his legs with raw kinetic force. Muscle fibres tore and knitted back together under the severe strain, burning through calories and mana at an alarming rate. He refused to kneel. Falling now, in the heart of the Dragon Empire, meant demonstrating a fundamental weakness that this world would exploit and destroy without hesitation.
Beside him, Vretbor did not share the struggle. The scarred Imperial instructor floated three feet above the ground in a specialized grav-chair built from dark, Imperial alloy, humming with compressed violet mana to support his ruined, paralyzed body with effortless mechanical grace. Resting his chin on a scarred fist, Vretbor observed Eshiren’s agonizing effort with absolute, clinical boredom.
"Breathe the air, boy," Vretbor instructed, his voice flat and devoid of any sympathy. "Don’t fight it. Earthgon is heavy. If you resist the gravity, it breaks your spine. Assimilate."
Eshiren opened his mouth. The air burned his throat, carrying an overwhelming density of raw elemental mana, thicker and infinitely more violent than the starved atmosphere of the Azarian slums. It tasted of sulfur and iron, rich enough to choke a normal human. His draconic lungs expanded, greedily devouring the energy, pulling it into his bloodstream to repair the micro-tears in his muscles.
They stood upon a vast, circular intake plaza paved in flawless obsidian. The sheer scale of the architecture defied reason. The plaza alone stretched for miles, bordered by towering pillars of black stone that reached toward a hazy, unnatural sky. Tens of thousands of figures moved across the expanse. Eshiren saw only Dragons. His draconic senses flared, assaulted by the overlapping auras of youths, Imperial clerks, and armored sentinels. Every individual possessed an aura that could rival Krazmakor’s vanguard.
"Move," Vretbor ordered, his grav-chair humming as it glided forward.
Eshiren forced his right foot forward. The stone felt magnetic, pulling at his boots. He dragged his left foot to join it. Each step required the kind of deliberate, mathematical calculation he usually reserved for mortal combat. He catalogued the shift in his center of gravity, the required muscular output, and the precise angle of his spine.
Exit points. Count them. His survivalist instincts screamed in the back of his skull, a frantic remnant of his life in Sector Four. Three archways. Four elevated walkways. Too heavily guarded. No cover. No shadows. The sightlines are unobstructed for two miles in every direction.
Escape from this plaza was physically impossible.
They approached a towering bureaucratic checkpoint constructed from pale crystal and black iron. Dozens of lines stretched out from the intake counters, filled with young Dragons of varying lineages waiting to be processed into the Academy. Some boasted shimmering crimson scales on their throats. Others displayed horns curling from their brows or elongated, reptilian pupils. All of them moved with an innate, predatory arrogance that made Eshiren’s skin crawl. They spoke in clipped Vreth’kaan, their voices echoing off the crystal barriers in harsh, guttural syllables.
Eshiren kept his head down, performing the role of a subjugated lesser. He listened to the conversations around him, picking up fragments of casual cruelty. A youth with pale blue scales bragged about executing a human servant for spilling wine, while another complained about the long journey from the core worlds. Fear was absent here. They viewed the Academy as a proving ground—a brutal arena built to accumulate power and status.
"Registration," a clerk demanded as Eshiren and Vretbor reached the front of the line. The Dragon behind the counter did not look up from a crystal ledger. He wore the gray robes of the administrative caste, his aura muted but sharply focused. "Lineage. Name. Blood-stamp."
Vretbor leaned forward in his grav-chair. "Conscript. Vesh lineage. Disgraced."
The clerk paused. A flicker of profound disgust crossed the clerk’s aristocratic features as he finally raised his head and looked at Eshiren. "Vesh. A dead house. You bring trash to the Academy, Instructor Vretbor?"
"The Conscription Edict does not filter for quality," Vretbor replied evenly, unbothered by the insult. "It filters for survival. Process him."
A shallow obsidian bowl slid across the counter toward Eshiren. A silver needle rested inside it, gleaming under the harsh artificial light.
"Blood-stamp," the clerk repeated, tapping a long, clawed finger against the ledger. "Verify the Vesh resonance."
Eshiren stared at the bowl. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. His blood carried the golden resonance of the 18th Dragon God mixed with Azarian heritage. If pure gold hit the obsidian bowl, the resulting mana signature would trigger every alarm in the sector. Krazmakor’s faction would know he survived the slums. The Inquisition would dissect him to understand his dual nature.
Control it, Eshiren told himself. Suppress the gold.
He closed his eyes. Deep in his chest, the dual cores rotated. The golden, warm energy of the Ohn-Thari pressed against the feral, crimson heat of his Dragon bloodline. The golden magic wanted to protect him, surging upward to meet the threat of the heavy atmosphere, but he had to chain it down. He visualized a cage built from heavy iron and thrust the golden magic inside it, slamming the metaphorical door shut. He locked it away, denying himself access to the ancient power that had saved his life on Azaria.
The effort caused a sharp, blinding pain to spike directly behind his eyes. His body trembled. Sweat beaded on his forehead, cold and clammy.
He picked up the silver needle.
Eshiren drove the point deep into his thumb. He squeezed hard, forcing the crimson heat of his lesser Dragon lineage to the surface. Three drops of dark blood fell into the obsidian bowl.
The fluid hit the black stone and sizzled. A dull, muddy red light pulsed outward, carrying the heavy, unrefined resonance of a lesser Dragon lineage. It lacked the brilliant clarity of pureblood mana, presenting exactly the profile of a disgraced, diluted house.
The clerk sneered, recording the result in the crystal ledger. "Pathetic purity. Designation accepted. Conscript Eshiren Vesh. You are assigned to the lowest rings. Move."
A heavy iron collar materialized on the counter. Before Eshiren could react, the clerk waved a hand. The collar snapped open, flew forward, and locked around his neck with a brutal, metallic click. The metal felt like ice against his skin. It hummed with a low-frequency vibration that began siphoning ambient mana from his body right away, creating a localized void around his throat.
"Suppression collar," Vretbor explained casually as they moved past the checkpoint, leaving the disgusted clerk behind. "Standard for conscripts. Keeps you from blowing up a training hall before you learn basic control. It limits your output to twenty percent."
Eshiren touched the cold iron. It made his limbs heavy and sluggish, stripping away the manic energy that usually thrummed through his veins. Stripped of his power and pinned to the stone by gravity, he was mortal.
They reached the edge of the intake plaza. Below them, a spiraling chasm dropped directly into the planetary crust. Concentric rings of brutalist stone architecture lined the descent, disappearing into a hazy, violet abyss that stretched miles downward. The heat rising from the depths smelled of forge fires and sweat. Thousands of young Dragons milled about on the uppermost ring, shouting, fighting, and forming temporary alliances before the true trials began.
The violence was casual and unpunished. In the space of ten seconds, Eshiren watched a hulking youth with obsidian horns grab a smaller initiate by the throat and hurl him over the railing into the abyss. The victim’s scream faded into the violet haze long before he hit the bottom. No instructors intervened. No alarms sounded. The other initiates simply stepped around the space the smaller boy had occupied, accepting the murder as a standard disciplinary action.
"This is your drop point," Vretbor stated. The grav-chair rotated slightly, turning the crippled instructor away from the edge of the chasm.
Eshiren grabbed the armrest of the chair, his grip tightening enough to dent the Imperial alloy. "You’re leaving me here? With no instructions?"
Vretbor looked down at Eshiren’s hand. That gaze held enough latent violence to melt steel, a silent promise of horrific retaliation if Eshiren didn’t let go. Eshiren slowly uncurled his fingers and stepped back, dropping his arm to his side.
"Instructions are for those who possess value," Vretbor said, adjusting his posture in the chair. "You have no value, Eshiren Vesh. You are a disgraced conscript from a dead house. If you want to learn the language of truth, you must first survive the week. I will return in seven days. If you are alive, I will teach you."
A profound, suffocating isolation settled over Eshiren. The brutal machinery of the Academy loomed over him, indifferent to his existence. He was a speck of dust in an engine built to grind planets into ash, surrounded by predators who would kill him for a fraction of a misstep.
Desperately seeking something familiar to ground his fracturing mind, he looked upward. He searched the sky for the constellation of the Hunter, the arrangement of stars he used to trace from the alleyways of Sector Four when the thick Azarian smog cleared.
The sky above Earthgon was wrong.
A pale, unbroken blue or the deep violet of a high-altitude atmosphere should have covered the daylight heavens. Instead, dark metal bands crisscrossed the sky to form an immense grid. It stretched from horizon to horizon. Thousands of bright points of light moved in mathematical patterns beyond the grid, blotting out natural celestial bodies.
"They aren’t stars," Vretbor noted, tracking Eshiren’s gaze upward.
Eshiren blinked, tearing his eyes away from the overwhelming, impossible display.
The artificial gravity in the plaza stuttered. For a fraction of a second, Eshiren lost all weight, his heavy boots lifting a millimeter off the stone. The sudden lack of pressure caused his stomach to drop. Then the crushing weight returned, driving him back down with brutal force that vibrated through his bones.
Vretbor spat on the cobblestones. "The Swarm is pulling too much power from the planetary core. They must be moving the third defensive fleet."
"What is that?" Eshiren asked, his voice barely a whisper, pointing at the glowing grid.
"That is the reality of the Dragon Empire," Vretbor answered, his tone carrying a rare note of grim respect. "Earthgon hasn’t seen a real star in a millennium. Those lights are orbital weapons platforms, defense rings, and bone-gardens. You are looking at a Dyson Swarm, built to harvest the entire energy output of our artificial sun and protect the homeworld from the Multiversal War."
Eshiren stared at the impossible engineering. The scale of it broke his mind. He had spent his entire life fighting street Enforcers and hiding in sewers, believing the Empire was just a cruel, tyrannical government holding Azaria hostage. The truth stood before him in cold iron and starlight.
The Empire was a cosmic machine, and it was terrified of something else.
"Survive," Vretbor repeated. The grav-chair hummed loudly, propelling the instructor away from the drop point and back toward the upper administrative tiers, leaving Eshiren alone at the precipice.
Eshiren stood at the edge of the chasm, the violet haze rising around him. Behind him, heavy footsteps approached. A Dragon youth with crimson scales rippling across his forearms deliberately shoved into his shoulder, attempting to push him toward the railing.
"Move, trash," the youth snarled, baring rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Eshiren did not apologize. He did not step aside. He let the impact hit him, grounding his stance and absorbing the force without moving a single muscle. The youth stumbled, thrown off balance by Eshiren’s unnatural density.
The boy turned, his eyes flashing with violent anger, reaching for the hilt of a bone-knife strapped to his thigh.
Eshiren met the gaze. He killed the Azarian survivalist inside his head. He buried the terrified boy who counted exits and hid in the dark, chaining that vulnerable part of himself away alongside the Golden Magic.
The game had changed. Hiding would only get him killed in the lower rings of the Academy. If he wanted to survive, if he wanted to tear this machine down and free Senreno, he had to become the monster they expected him to be.
Eshiren Vesh stepped forward into the crucible.
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