Chapter 2
TWO
CYAN
Earendel was hard under his boot as Cyan stepped off his shuttle at 3400. Dust puffed in a plume from the sandstone, settling quickly in the dry desert air. His first breath drew in a strange, salty tang—a sharpness that seemed to cling to his tongue. He brought up his dataslate for terrain composition, suspecting he’d find a good amount of sodium in the stone.
Only just as the damn thing began to pull up the data, the screen flickered and died.
Cyan sighed, stashing it in his jacket. Perfect timing. He ran his fingers absently through the tuft of fur on his left. Priad nudged into his leg, heavy breaths clouding in the dimness as the warg tasted the new air. Cyan scratched the beast absently, lifting his eyes to the vast expanse above them.
And then he saw it.
Where he’d expected darkness, a nebula sprawled across the night sky in vast, luminous swirls, its colors rippling like oil on water. Hazy clouds of violet and emerald wove together with threads of brilliant, shimmering blue, casting a faint glow over the landscape .
The nebula reached out from the galaxy's depths to brush against this edge-of-nowhere world, bathing the sandstone in spectral hues. Dust from his arrival caught flickers of light as it settled. The scene was surreal, vast, almost alive—and he, a mere speck in the face of all that eternity.
Cyan reached instinctively for the hilt of the sword at his hip, grounding himself as he stared upward. This wasn’t just another planet—it was a world on the edge of everything, where even the sky was different, and the universe was watching.
He’d never expected to end up here. Earendel was barely reachable, and barely desirable to reach by anyone except traders, suicidal explorers, and questionable characters who had reasons not to be found. Yet the weight at his hip led him here, and so here he was. The warg on his left looked up at him expectantly, tongue lolling from his mouth.
Earendel was warm.
Cyan tried the dataslate again to no avail, then looked toward the road leading straight to an illuminated city up ahead.
Chevron , he remembered from his preparatory research. He clipped the leash to Priad’s studded collar.
“All right,” he sighed. “Let’s go.”
The dark road was empty, and heavy with a sense of inevitability. Like he was treading the path he was supposed to tread—and so he would. The sword’s presence was a comforting tether. Its guidance was all he had to take. Its weight was great, but its direction always true. Cyan remained its loyal follower.
He smiled wryly to himself. Sometimes he liked to pretend he had a choice.
On the outskirts of the city, he stopped. It was a quiet street, and late enough for all the lights to be off in the windows, slatted blinds drawn shut. Beside him, Priad sniffed the air, ears pivoting. Was there danger?
Cyan turned toward a two-story block house, some kind of storefront at the bottom floor and grated stairs leading up to what was probably the shopkeeper’s residence at the top. It looked new enough, with a fresh coat of green paint. The whole street looked fairly neat and well-to-do. He thought he saw the faint glow of a dataslate behind the sheer curtains on the upper floor, but couldn’t be sure.
“Let’s go, boy.” Cyan was tired. He needed rest, and so did the warg.
In the center, he found more life. People doing business, sitting outside bars. The outerwear on Earendel was unmistakably functional but had an odd elegance—tailored for the harsh, sandy winds yet hugging the body in ways that felt almost ceremonial. A metallic sheen woven through the rough fabrics caught the light from the nebula above. Many had layered jackets that seemed heavy and heat-resistant, their colors a blend of muted ivory, ochres, and flashes of iridescent blue—a tint he hadn’t expected to find this far out from the galactic core.
Cyan found a holdover in the middle of the town square that doubled as a bar on the lower floor. At least he could get a drink on Earendel.
“We don’t take pets,” the keeper said gruffly, sliding a glass of brew across the bar toward him. “Not in here, and not in the rooms.”
“He’ll behave.”
“Yeah, they all say that. That thing is huge. I don’t need fur in my establishment.”
“Where else can we stay? ”
“Nowhere, ‘less you make a friend, if you know what I mean.” The keeper nodded at a group of women and two men sitting at the other end of the bar.
“I don’t need those kinds of friends.”
“Then you can tie that friend outside for the night.”
Cyan worked his jaw, compelled to argue, but perhaps his first night on the planet was not the best to make enemies.
“Come, boy,” he tugged on the leash, leading Priad outside.
He found a quiet spot that would be shaded by an overhang underneath the tavern windows and secured the lead there. Priad, having realized what was going on, pawed the ground. Massive claws dug trenches in the sandstone.
“I’ll figure something out for tomorrow.” Cyan took the warg’s furry face between his hands, smoothing his brows with both thumbs. “Just lie low for tonight.”
Priad emitted a whine of protest.
“Down, now,” Cyan directed, pointing at the ground. He pressed on the warg’s back gently until the beast circled once, twice in his spot, then flopped with a frustrated huff. “Good boy. I’ll get you some meat.”
He insisted on the room with a window facing directly down to the spot where Priad was tethered. Inside, Cyan set his pack on the rickety chair at the wall. His broken dataslate came next, tossed on the bed like the dead weight it was. Finally, he unstrapped the sword on his back and walked to the window. Its weight was a comfort in his hands as he inspected it in the cool glow of the nighttime nebula. The dark, ashy gray of the broad tungsten alloy blade appeared to swallow more light than it reflected. It shifted under his eye, its will rippling silently beneath his gaze. The breadth of the blade spanned the length of his palm—a solid albatross that none but those it chose could have the strength to wield.
Cyan had wielded it for centuries. Or what felt like centuries anyway. Time stopped having meaning when the sword came to him, and now… well, he wasn’t even sure how long it had been.
He felt ancient.
The sword was a guide and an executioner. Thrice before, Cyan had used it to end a life. The powerful schemer siphoning orbital energy in attempts to create a new wormhole. The colony ship commander who had convinced herself to murder all on board and detonate the ship in range of a population hub. The cult leader convincing followers to end their own lives en masse for “redemption.” Cyan had learned a hard lesson with each—true evil, the sort his sword would guide him toward, cannot be redeemed. Cutting the rot at the root was the only way to restore order. And now he was here again, searching for whatever corruption the blade would have him uproot.
Evil does not change.
No matter that each time he used the sword, its weight had grown heavier on his back. That was his punishment to bear.
Cyan startled from his memories as the weapon of order in his hand caught the light. He stared at the blade. He was overtired and seeing things.
And yet there it was in front of him plain as day. The thin, jagged vein of hardened gold running down the length of the blade, hilt to tip… The lifeless thread he had traced countless times and knew as well as the back of his hand… It burned before him with a pulsing crimson glow.