Chapter 22: Homecoming
The Krasnikov moved soundlessly through the abyss, a warship built for battle, now ferrying only a father and son in silence. Beyond the thick observation glass, Orion watched as their homeworld grew larger, its atmosphere a swirl of blues and deep violets against the void. He should have felt relief returning home, but his mind was elsewhere—fractured between the weight of his father's words and the unknown frontier that had been thrust upon him.
He wasn't just training for the academy anymore. That path had been stripped away before he'd even had a chance to walk it. Instead, he was being molded for something else—something beyond even the Apex candidates.
Orion sat alone in the observation deck, fingers tightening against the armrest. His body still hummed with the energy of his recent training session, but the adrenaline had faded, replaced by something colder. Cassian hadn't said much since their last conversation on the shuttle.
There was nothing else to be said.
The Dysarchial Raptures.
The name felt like an omen.
He had never heard of them before, never came across them in any of the texts available to him. How could something so important—so integral to humanity's greatest gains and losses—be hidden from an heir of an archon family?
The answer was clear. The Confederacy either stood to lose too much profit from public access—or the Raptures were still relatively new phenomena, and they were racing to solidify their control over them before another power could stake its claim.
Orion wasn't naive enough to think that the Confederacy's secrecy was purely for humanity's safety. No, there was always an underlying calculus. If the Raptures had been responsible for their greatest technological leaps, then monopolizing them wasn't just about containment—it was about power. Whoever controlled the Raptures controlled the future.
But there was something more unsettling about it. If the Confederacy's hold on the Raptures was still being cemented, then that meant much about them remained unknown. The fact that even an heir like himself had never heard of them suggested the level of control being exerted over information flow. How much had been deliberately erased? How much did they still not understand themselves?
The implications gnawed at him. If humanity had already benefited from discoveries within the Raptures—the Genesis Strain, breakthroughs in physics and warfare—then what horrors had remained buried, too dangerous to be revealed?