The dreams came like fire.
Crimson towers spiraling into stars. The smell of cindering roses. A man in obsidian armor, kneeling before her with a dagger in one hand and her broken crown in the other.
And always—always—that voice.
“Wake up, Zarathi. You are not meant to sleep.”
Kas jolted upright in her bunk, sweat slicking her palms. The hum of the cargo freighter Mistriel was steady and cold. Space stretched endlessly outside her viewport, an ocean of unmarked coordinates and forgotten systems.
She was seventeen. Or so the documents said. She had no real birth record—just a chip with a broken family seal, a strand of violet hair braided with silver thread, and a name whispered to her in fever-dreams.
Zarathos.
A planet not on any official map.
And yet… she remembered it. The sensation of gravity beneath dual suns. The taste of fruit with electric juice. The press of duty on her chest like ceremonial armor. But most of all, the fall—the screams, the betrayal, the pain.
Kas didn’t know if she was insane.
Only that she wasn’t normal.
Not when her emotions could twist physics.
The Mistriel’s captain, Juno Marris, had found her half-dead in a wrecked skiff drifting off the Beryl Fringe three years ago. She should’ve spaced her. But instead, Juno patched her up and made her work—scavenging, coding, pulling parts from derelict machines. Kas was fast. Too fast.
Her hands moved with memory she didn’t own.
Her reflexes were perfect when panicked.
And when cornered, angry, or frightened—objects bent around her, sometimes breaking. Once, a full steel beam had exploded outward from her scream. Another time, a man trying to grab her saw his own memories projected out loud.
She didn’t know how. Or why.
Until she met Vaelrix.
Vaelrix was a diplomat’s pet on the surface—an eight-legged, serpentine being who wore a voice-cloak to mimic human tones. But he was more than a novelty. In secret, he was an Archivist of the Untethered, a historian of buried bloodlines and forbidden legacies.
He found her on the station-world of Caltheron Prime after she accidentally knocked over a memory lattice and triggered a vision of her supposed execution—one she had never lived, but felt.
Vaelrix had hissed then, reverent and afraid.
“You bleed truth, girl. The throne of Zarathos was never emptied—only scattered.”
Zarathos had once ruled not just a planet, but the inner circle of the Infiniversal Nexus—a council of old, wise bloodlines that governed the ethics of portal travel, matter replication, and realm-anchoring.
But over time, their influence waned, and enemies grew.
A coordinated coup, orchestrated by a coalition of exiled technocrats and rogue Despotic sympathizers, had wiped the House of Zarathos from the stars. Or so history claimed.
Yet deep in hidden archives, Vaelrix found anomalies—security records corrupted by what looked like quantum static. Genetic chains unaccounted for. Survivor signals buried in time-locked drives.
One name kept reappearing: Kasariah Vel Zarathi.
Her name. Her full name.
Vaelrix took her to the Vault of Echoes, hidden beneath the shattered moons of Meraxis, where memory itself could be played like light. He explained the truth of her abilities:
Each time her emotions breached their threshold, she triggered an ancient neuro-coding known as Blood Resonance—a biological lock meant to keep the heir of Zarathos alive and hidden.
But unlocking those fragments wasn’t benign.
It came at a price.
The more she remembered, the less control she had over now. Her powers surged. Memories became weapons. Once, in a dream-trigger, she had spoken in a long-dead tongue and shattered the room around her with a thought.
Kas wasn’t just a girl anymore.
She was a living key.
And every power in the Infiniverse wanted to claim her… or kill her.
They began to hunt her.
The Obsidian Accord, a shadow cabal of former Nexus elites.
The Despotics, ever-watchful for threats to their new frontier.
Even the Mindforged—synthetic archivists sworn to protect stability—declared her an anomaly.
Everywhere she went, systems crashed. Alliances fractured. She didn’t mean to destabilize planets, but the idea of Zarathos reborn rippled like wildfire. Forgotten nobles rose. Old enemies remembered oaths.
And all the while, Kas fought to understand what being heir meant.
Was it duty? Vengeance? Redemption?
Was she meant to rebuild Zarathos?
Or destroy the legacy that had led to its downfall?
She found answers in a derelict vault-world, where time ran slower and echoes of the past could still speak.
There, inside a throne chamber fused with forgotten tech, she saw herself—a child, clinging to her dying mother’s hand, as the woman whispered the final failsafe.
“You will be no one, so that one day you can be everything.”
A mother’s love.
A queen’s burden.
An exile’s hope.
Kas collapsed then.
She screamed.
And the chamber listened.
The planet awakened—its core pulsing with ancient Zarathian power keyed to her bloodline. She wasn’t just heir.
She was anchor.
To the planet. To the power. To its past.
She had to choose now.
Run from it.
Or become it.
Kas chose fire.
She broadcast the truth across the Infiniverse: her memories, her bloodline, the crimes of the past, and her vow.
Not to rebuild the old world.
But to forge a new one.
One not of thrones or blood, but of earned legacy.
Where power wasn’t inherited—it was proven.
She took no crown.
But she lit the banner of Zarathos once more.
And across the stars, in silence and fear, the Despotics watched.
Because the girl with fragmented memories…
Had remembered everything.
And she was no longer afraid to feel.