Echoes of the Fallen
Seraphina Kael had faced impossible negotiations before. She had brokered uneasy truces between warlords, soothed the tempers of feuding planetary governors, and quelled riots with nothing but the weight of her voice. But this - this was beyond human comprehension.
The Aetherians did not see them as equals.
She stood alongside Lyra Renfield in the vast, gravity-defying construct that the Aetherians called a Communion Chamber - though the term barely captured the surreal nature of the place. A crystalline void stretched endlessly around them, shimmering fractals of light forming intricate, shifting patterns. There were no walls, no floors, no ceilings - only a vast and unfathomable emptiness where thought and presence dictated reality.
The Aetherians had no need for physical bodies in this space. Instead, they projected forms as towering, semi-transparent figures, their silhouettes in constant flux - faces shifting, features warping, as though they were echoes of countless beings at once. Seraphina fought the primal urge to retreat. She was a diplomat, trained to suppress fear, but the sheer magnitude of their presence made her very existence feel small. Insignificant.
A voice, not spoken but felt, reverberated through the chamber.
"You are reckless. You are young. You burn with hunger that will consume you, as it consumed us."
The statement was not a warning. It was a certainty.
Seraphina inhaled slowly. "We seek understanding," she said, her voice unwavering despite the pressure pressing against her mind. "We seek peace."
Aetherian figures flickered and shifted in response, their luminescent eyes piercing. The atmosphere grew heavier, charged with something beyond emotion - beyond anger, beyond disappointment. It was a presence old enough to have witnessed the birth and death of entire civilizations.
Lyra, ever the scientist, took a step forward, her gaze alight with determination. "Your records - your archives - speak of a time when your kind were not like this. You chose to become something else. Why?"
Silence. Or something that felt like silence.
Then, without warning, the chamber transformed around them. No longer were they standing in the void of shimmering light. Instead, they found themselves in the ruins of a dead world - an Aetherian world.
It was vast and hollow, an entire planet of shattered structures, floating remnants of what must have once been a civilization of impossible grandeur. Towering monoliths of obsidian and crystal jutted out from the fractured crust, but they were lifeless now - abandoned, broken.
Above them, the sky boiled with the remnants of war. The remnants of something that should have never happened.
An Aetherian figure loomed before them, gesturing to the destruction.
"We were as you are," it intoned. "We hungered for more. We harnessed the Stellar Ether. It changed us. Elevated us. But our kind fractured."
New figures materialized - ghostly projections of past Aetherians, locked in a war unlike any Seraphina had ever seen. It was not a war of weapons, but of unraveling existence itself. Space folded and collapsed around them as entities wielding raw cosmic power unmade one another. Entire cities vanished into nothingness. Stars were devoured in a single moment of devastation.
And then, silence once more.
"We ended our war by ending ourselves," the Aetherian continued. "Only those who accepted the void - the stillness - remained."
Seraphina exchanged a glance with Lyra. The implications were horrifying. The Aetherians had once been mortal, like humanity. But their own ambitions had doomed them, twisting them into something beyond life, beyond death.
Lyra's voice was barely above a whisper. "You... chose to forget what you were."
The Aetherians did not answer.
Seraphina took a step forward, her breath steady but her mind racing. "Then why give us the Stellar Ether?" she asked. "If you knew what it would do to us, why offer it?"
The Aetherians regarded her, unreadable. Then, a single word echoed through her mind.
"Judgment."
Seraphina's heart clenched. Not a gift. A test.
A test humanity was failing.
The chamber dissolved back into shimmering light, the ruined world vanishing in an instant. The Aetherians loomed once more, and though they did not move, Seraphina felt the weight of their conclusion.
"You will destroy yourselves. As we did. As all who hunger do."
Seraphina clenched her fists. "Not if we change. Not if we choose to be more."
"Can you?"
The voice rang through her, through Lyra, through the very foundations of GOER's fragile hope.
There was no certainty in the answer.