Wretched Star

CHAPTER ONE: ASH AND BLOOD & CHAPTER TWO: THE THROAT

The smell of scorched metal.

The sound of boots over bodies.

The tremble in my fists that isn’t fear—just memory.

I’m breathing hard.

Too hard.

Vision flickers. Bright, then dim. The flickering pulse of emergency lights strobes against blood-slicked walls. Sirens wail low in the background—more like mourning than warning now. My body moves through the corridor like I’ve done this before. Because I have.

Dozens of times. On dozens of worlds.

I step over corpses twisted in their own armor, black blood pooling beneath them. My knuckles are cut. My shoulder’s ripped open. Doesn’t matter. Pain is a friend I’ve stopped listening to.

My name is Vorrak.

And this ship is about to die.

One last corridor.

Then the floor shakes.

Heavy footsteps. Not retreating. Advancing.

Through the smoke and heat shimmer, I see a figure.

Broad. Reptilian. Obsidian armor dulled by the blood of others.

Varnok the Hollow.

One of his dogs. One of the Sovereign Blades. The kind of bastard whose name is written in the screams of the enslaved.

His voice is just as I remember it—smooth and guttural.

“Vorrak. The last of the Greys. I was hoping it’d be you.”

I don’t answer.

I just raise my fist.

“Still so quiet. Just like when we dragged you in chains,” he says, stepping closer. “I almost didn’t recognize you without the collar.”

My fist tightens.

“You should’ve stayed buried. Your kind evolved too fast. You forgot your place in the order of things.”

He tilts his head, as if studying me.

“That was your real crime. Not rebellion. Not knowledge. Potential.”

He rolls his shoulders. His armor hums. I can hear the plates tightening.

“Zyrrak-Vol made sure your species never reached that potential.”

I lunge before he finishes his sentence.

The first punch lands against his gauntlet. Sparks fly. My shoulder burns as I rotate mid-swing and slam my elbow into his side. He barely moves. But I felt it.

He counters fast. Slams a plated knee into my ribs and sends me reeling into the wall. I grunt and spit blood.

“Still soft,” he taunts. “Still just a wounded dog howling into the stars.”

I charge again, faster now. I duck his blade and land a heavy right hook.

CRACK.

His jaw twists. That felt good.

But that’s when it happens.

Flash.

The corridor disappears. The screams fall silent.

And I see—

Sunlight. Real sunlight.

Not artificial, not filtered.

I’m running through the crystal fields of Elaris, my home. My feet are bare. My brother’s laugh echoes beside me. Mother’s voice is calling us for dinner.

I’m smiling.

Then—

SLAM.

I’m back in the present, slamming Varnok into a wall. He growls, but I’m not listening. My heart is thundering too loud.

Flash.

The sky is burning.

Warships breaking through the clouds like monstrous gods.

Buildings crumble beneath plasma strikes.

My father shoves me into a shelter.

“Don’t look back!”

I do anyway.

I see fire eating my city alive.

Back in the corridor. I’m roaring now—fists like meteors.

Varnok stumbles. He’s bleeding. So am I.

We’re circling each other. He spits acid-tinged saliva.

“That rage is what makes you weak.”

“No,” I finally speak.

“That rage is what keeps me alive.”

I swing again—

Flash.

I’m standing in the middle of a battlefield.

My father is on the ground.

His eyes are open. Dead.

My mother is screaming, dragging her body toward me—her legs gone.

I scream.

But it’s silent. I can’t hear my own voice. Just a pulse. One steady, aching note in my skull.

Then she falls.

I fall with her.

Back in the corridor—I’m a monster now.

Punching. Breaking. Screaming.

Varnok blocks some hits, but his rhythm is gone.

I land a knee to his throat. He chokes, gurgles, stumbles back.

“You remember now?” I growl, grabbing his throat. “You remember who you chained?”

Flash.

Chains around my wrists.

I’m small. A child.

Dragged through black corridors. Laughter from soldiers echoing around me.

Whips crack. I fall.

I rise.

I fall again.

Varnok is there.

He’s always been there.

He lifts my chin with a boot.

“Break easy, Grey. Or we’ll make it worse.”

I’m on my knees now.

But I’m not a man anymore.

I’m a child.

And I’m crying.

In the dark.

A voice breaks through the black.

It’s my mother.

Soft. Gentle.

Like the fields of Elaris.

“No matter what they take from you… remember your name.”

My chains clink as I clench my fists.

“You are Vorrak.”

My lip trembles. A single tear hits the metal floor.

Then something shifts in me.

The trembling stops.

My eyes rise.

Still wet. Still broken.

But my lips curl.

Into a smile.

Not of hope.

But of rage.

Of rebirth.

“This is how it began.”

CHAPTER TWO: THE THROAT

They called it The Throat.

Because once you were swallowed, you never came back up.

The stench of iron, rot, and smoke.

Chains rattling with every footstep.

The hum of machines above and below, chewing through stone and bodies alike.

I was eight.

They didn’t care.

I remember the first lash.

Not because it hurt. But because I didn’t scream.

The overseer didn’t like that.

So he struck again.

“You cry when you’re nothing. So the galaxy remembers you’re nothing.”

I still didn’t scream.

The collar around my neck pulsed once.

A needle punctured my skin, releasing something that made my spine lock and my ears ring.

That was day one.

We slept on steel.

We worked until blood pooled under our nails.

And if we collapsed, they dragged us to the furnace and burned us with the waste.

The air was never clear.

Just thick with rust, sweat, and the moaning of broken bones.

Above us, the Dominion watched from shadowed catwalks—silent figures behind glass panels.

Sometimes they’d point. Sometimes they wouldn’t. But when they did, the guards came with blades.

Those chosen never returned.

The pits were tiered like a hollow mountain turned upside down.

I was on the lowest tier—the crawlspace.

Children, the injured, and those too small to carry real weight.

We were used for crawling into broken conduits, gathering raw core dust, cleaning the floor with our own clothes.

There were hundreds of us. All species.

Greys. Insectoids. Even humans.

No one spoke their real name. It was stolen the moment you arrived.

They gave us numbers.

Mine was 873.

But I remembered.

Vorrak.

A girl once whispered hers to me.

Tiny, maybe six. Pale skin with ash in her eyes.

“I was called Liri before.”

I nodded.

A week later, she slipped climbing an oil shaft. The fall shattered her body.

They left her there.

Her corpse twitched for hours before it stopped.

We had one rule in the crawlspace:

Don’t look up.

Up meant hope.

Up meant light.

And light was only for the ones who wore black armor and walked above the flames.

Hope would get you killed. Or worse, noticed.

There were guards stationed in rotating towers.

Their laughter echoed louder than the alarms.

They drank. Spit. Gambled.

Sometimes they’d bet on how long a child would last in the fire tunnels.

Sometimes they’d make us fight.

I fought once.

A boy twice my size. Broken horn. Reptilian. One eye.

He roared and charged. I didn’t move.

I waited. Then I bit.

Tore into his throat.

He died choking on his own blood.

They clapped.

I was seven.

That night, one of the guards came down and crouched beside my cell.

His armor creaked when he smiled.

“You’ll be fun to break.”

He shocked me in my sleep for no reason the next three nights.

By the time I turned nine, they had taken everything from me—my family, my childhood, my species, my silence.

But not my mind.

And never my name.

One day, a new prisoner was thrown into the crawlspace—older than the rest. Scarred. His eyes were sunken but alert. A human.

They called him “Dog.”

He didn’t speak the first three days. Just watched.

Then on the fourth day, when a guard dragged a boy out by the leg, Dog stood.

“Put him down.”

Everyone froze.

The guard stopped. Turned. Laughed.

Dog didn’t flinch.

The guard lifted his rifle. Smiled.

Dog moved faster than I’d ever seen anyone move.

He took the rifle, broke the guard’s arm, and slammed his head into the steel.

Once. Twice. A third time.

No cheering. No sound. Just awe.

Then the alarms screamed. Lights flashed. Dozens of guards poured in.

They beat him for hours.

We watched. In silence. Like ghosts learning how to breathe again.

That night, I asked him through the bars, “Why?”

His lips were cracked, but his voice was sharp.

“Because the only thing more terrifying than monsters… is memory.”

I didn’t understand.

Not yet.

But I remembered those words.

A month later, Dog was taken.

Dragged by chain across the fire bridges to the upper levels.

He didn’t scream.

He looked at me one last time.

“Remember who you are.”

Then he vanished into the light.

I never saw him again.

But I remembered.

I remembered everything.

The chains. The hunger. The pain.

The first body. The second. The first scar. The second name I never told.

And the name they could never burn out of me:

Vorrak.