Astra and Vesper had shared a quiet corner of the Shadow Estate's dining wing, speaking of trivial things — tournament upsets, politics, strange dreams. Their voices bounced gently off obsidian walls trimmed with silver leaf, shadows dancing across arched ceilings like ghosts in silk.
The table between them was filled with meats and delicacies, rich with desert spices and history. A massive roasted bird lay at its center, basted in saffron butter and crusted with date-paste and powdered pistachio. Its skin crackled as Astra carved a slice, the golden sheen peeling back to reveal flesh so tender it fell apart beneath his fork. Alongside it were lamb ribs slow-cooked in rosewater and black pepper, their bones charred for a smoky snap. Plates of freekeh steeped in bone broth, studded with caramelized onions, rested beside bowls of labneh swirled with crimson pomegranate molasses. Even the air tasted of spice and firewood.
"I'll never get used to how damn good Shadow food is," Astra had muttered between bites, licking a smear of tamarind glaze from his thumb.
Vesper only smirked, stretching like a cat, muscle and silk catching the lamplight. "Enjoy it while you can, princess. It's back to roots and rations once we reach the plains."
Eventually, they parted. Vesper had affairs to attend to — which probably meant charming courtiers or terrorizing newer recruits. Astra, however, lingered.
He found himself back in his room, gazing at flickering footage of the earlier battles. Aster Hunt. Even injured, she moved like a storm given form — every punch brimming with unspoken fury, every kick artful and brutal. There was a clarity in her eyes, not just focus... but purpose. It unnerved him.
How can someone fight like that without breaking?
Lost in thought, Astra eventually left the comfort of his chambers. The Shadow Estate was endless. Beneath its glorious halls and mirrored salons were miles of corridors older than even the House itself — a labyrinth of stone, secrets, and sleep.
He wandered without thinking. Step after step, his thoughts swirled — about the curse, about Vesper's warnings, about the angels, and devils in his dreams, and Aster. Until…
A string shimmered into existence midair — a single, glowing thread, faint and silver like moonlight stretched taut.
It pulsed. Not with power. But with familiarity.
Astra froze.
His breath caught in his throat, and the star core nestled within his chest shuddered. That gentle trembling — he hadn't felt it since Odin, the Angel of Steel, looked into his soul and told him he was marked by fate.
"…Shit," he muttered.
His curse of curiosity — the ever-hungering, ever-digging whisper of knowledge in his blood — awakened. It wasn't just a hunch. It was a pull. A song. A feeling in the bones that something important was near, and to turn away would be to deny destiny itself.
He followed the string.
Down and down. Past sealed doors and ancient banners. Shadows grew thicker, the lights less frequent, until the corridor itself seemed to bend inward — swallowing sound, distorting distance.
Finally, he stood before a door.
It was old. No — ancient. Formed from blackened wood so aged it had petrified into stone. Around its edges, runes flickered faintly, carved deep into the surface like veins of fire. Astra stepped closer, eyes narrowing. He couldn't read them — not exactly — but he recognized the structure.
Ancient Saharan script. Forgotten dialect. He had seen it once in a stolen scroll beneath Duskfall's ruins. That time it warned of sealing gods.
He sighed. "Of course it's Saharan. Can't just be something easy like 'Storage Room B.'"
Still, he worked. His mana network flexed, drawing on the celestial circuit that marked him as a Star Mage. Glyph by glyph, his eyes decoded the puzzle, a whispered phrase falling from his lips as it unraveled:
"Shadows of Fate, Shadows of Death, Shadows of Life."
"…That's not ominous at all," he deadpanned.
With a groan and a push, he opened the door.
The air changed.
Inside was a vast chamber — not dusty, but perfectly preserved, like the room itself had been sealed outside of time. The walls were lined with curved shelves stacked with ancient tomes, scrolls tied in serpent silk, crystal jars holding strange roots and stardust. Alchemical tools glimmered beneath a glass ceiling that showed not the estate above, but a dark starless sky of shadows, ancient shadows, holy shadows...divine shadows, Astra couldn't even feel them.
A massive table of black stone sat in the center, etched with a onyx stone that resembled a scythe.
The Library of Shadows.
Astra's intuition screamed.
His skin tingled, heart pounding in his chest like a war drum.
"Strange... what could possibly be here?"
A faint chime rang out.
His mage coin shimmered, glyphs pulsing gently as a translucent message hovered in the air:
[New Quest]Find the Artifact of Night
Astra blinked, stared at it, and groaned.
"Of course there's an artifact."
He looked around the vast chamber — the countless books, the starmaps, the crystal vats and half-alive scrolls whispering spells in forgotten languages.
He exhaled slowly, rubbing his temples.
"…This is going to take a while."
And with a final sigh, he rolled up his sleeves and began to look.
Astra walked deeper into the Library of Shadows, his boots echoing softly against the stone as he trailed fingers along tables layered with the dust of centuries. The air here was thick, ancient — not stale, but heavy, almost conscious. It felt like the room itself had been waiting.
Above him hung the skeleton of a giant — at least fifteen feet tall — suspended in dark iron chains. Its bones were laced with black veins, petrified with ancient mana, and Astra could feel that it had once been a Rank Four… maybe even Five. Its skull bore strange, serpentine horns curling inward like a crown, and its hands were clawed and massive, with one finger pointing directly to the central dais of the chamber.
The shadows in this place whispered, but not to him. They were too old. Too proud. This was not his domain. He could feel it in the way they recoiled at his presence, the way they refused to bend to his will. Here, Astra was not the master of the dark — he was an intruder, a mortal trespassing into the memory of the divine.
As he moved through the rows of preserved artifacts, the sheer volume of ancient power overwhelmed his senses.
He passed a glass-encased spear — its tip carved from sky-iron and its shaft made of white wyvernbone — tagged with a plaque that read:
"Spear of Selem, the Dawn Slayer — snapped upon the spine of the last Dream Elk."
Another case held a set of obsidian knives, thin as needles, whispering promises in a forgotten tongue. Next to them was a pair of jade vials, each containing swirling fluids — one gold, the other a shifting crimson. Their labels had long faded, but one still bore a symbol: a sun being swallowed by a star.
Books filled the back walls, some wrapped in chain bindings, others sealed with wax and strange teeth, humming faintly. One bore a sigil of a bleeding moon, and Astra swore it blinked at him when he walked past.
He paused at a taxidermied creature, draped in cracked glass — a creature that looked like a lion but bore feathered wings and three eyes on each side of its face. Beneath it, in silver ink, read:
"Stellar Chimera — last of its kind. Fed only on comet-born beasts. Slain by accident in the Great Hunt of House Shadow, Year 611."
Astra shook his head, overwhelmed.
Then it happened.
As he passed by a low shelf of rusted relics — things that looked like broken timepieces and shattered navigation tools — his body froze. His mana surged. His curse of curiosity spiked, and the threads in the air twisted violently before him.
His star core pulsed once, hard.Then again.And again.
He turned.
There, tucked on a leaning obsidian shelf beneath a broken hourglass and a shard of black ice, A large, ancient astrolabe, rimmed in black starmetal and inlaid with faint, celestial etchings. Even when dormant, the stars upon its surface shimmer softly in a shifting pattern no human eye can memorize.
He stared at it, mouth slightly open.
Because he could see them — the threads. His curiosity surged.They weren't like the usual mana threads he occasionally glimpsed during meditation or battle.These were divine.Thick, golden-white, woven like constellations, connecting the astrolabe to... nothing. To everything.
His hands shook as he reached for it.
The moment his fingers closed around its cold, metallic form, his Regal Coin flared, spinning in his chest with bright, blue-gold starlight.
[Quest Complete: Find the Artifact of Night.]
The astrolabe whirred, faintly.
Its etched plates aligned, slowly revealing a glowing phrase in ancient Shararan:
"Wherever the stars shine, there you may tread, unseen. unburdened. unchained."
Reward Acquired: [Starfinder]
Rank VI
Tier I
Astra stared in shock and awe...mixed with a little bit of terror, as he read its description.
Because as he read its description, he realized what he held.
"The Stargazer loved to explore. They were known to visit warfronts and palaces alike — watching, recording, vanishing. No one knew how or when they moved. No one even knew they were there."
The Stargazer…
So this was their legacy.
And it had only two enchantments. That was what unsettled him most.A divine artifact, yet it bore no sprawling spellwork. No tangled runes or overwritten laws.Just two enchantments. Simple. Absolute.
[Celestial Alignment]
Tap into stellar ley lines to teleport anywhere between realms. Charges are limited and take time to replenish. The farther the distance, the more energy is consumed. Cannot teleport into divine sanctums or sealed domains without backlash.
[Charges Stored]
[10/1000]
"anywhere?....like literally anywhere?"
[A Quiet Night]
The user's presence is erased from perceptions.Becomes undetectable to even divine beings from a distance. Not seen. Not sensed. Not remembered.
"From perception?...like all perception?..what an undeniable boon."
This was a divine artifact, the statements were simple yet they were like laws.
When he wielded this artifact, He would be able to travel anywhere, Unseen by all
Astra swallowed hard as he cradled the Starfinder in his palm.
It was cold and infinite.
Astra blinked at the artifact in his hands, then quickly, instinctively stored it in his coin. The shadows around him stirred but did not move. No guardians, no alarms. Just him, the dust, and silence.
A Rank VI artifact.Divine.Left to rot on a half-collapsed obsidian shelf, in a shabby, forgotten room lined with rusted spears and cracked rings. In the Shadow Estate of Duskfall at that.Why?
He looked around again—truly looked—and shook his head.
"Why here?" he muttered. "Among scraps and rusted memory…"
It made no sense.Unless—
Unless it was never meant to be found.Unless only he could have seen it.
He glanced down at his chest, where the faint shimmer of his Star Core pulsed.And deeper still, he could feel it — the quiet ember of his Blessing of Curiosity, always flickering, always nudging.
"What a coincidence," he said dryly.
For half a second, he felt it.The threads — not of the astrolabe this time, but of fate.Tugging.
He gasped as a sharp headache stabbed through his skull, like a spike of light between his temples. The world tilted.
"F–fuck," he winced, clutching his head and lowering himself to the cold, dark marble. "I really need to stop doing that…"
He took a breath, exhaled slowly.
His gaze drifted to the now-silent artifact."Teleport anywhere, huh?" he murmured.A grin flickered at the corner of his lips. "Gods.I've always wanted to see the night sky without any light pollution…"
It was barely more than a passing thought.
But the his Blessing had other ideas.
before he even knew what he was doing
The astrolabe floated, spinning gently.
Astra froze.
"Wait, no—oh fuck—oh fuck—"
The Starfinder flared to life.
A sphere of brilliant celestial mana burst outward, encasing him.Constellations bloomed across the space around him — infinite, impossibly detailed.Orbits, star charts, unknown runic symbols spun in elegant, impossible patterns.He stood in the center of a cosmic machine.
And then—
Click.
It stopped.Locked into a single constellation — a jagged pattern shaped like a sword through a veil.
The magic surged inward.
Astra closed his eyes.
...
When he opened his eyes...
He staggered a step forward.
And froze.
His boots sank slightly into fine, silver-tinted sand. A chilled wind slid across the dunes, carrying with it the scent of ancient stone and forgotten stars.
But it wasn't the desert that stopped his breath.It was the sky.
The sky—
It was not a ceiling.It was not a dome.
It was not the ever familiar violet twilight of Duskfall no.
It was an ocean of infinity, stretched above him, drowning everything he'd ever thought he understood.
There was no haze, no glow of Duskfall's ever-burning lanterns. No clouds, no veil.Only night. True night.
And in it—stars.
So many stars he lost count in the first breath.Each one sharp and burning, painted with impossible colors: ice-blue, crimson, violet, gold.
Galaxies spun like blooming flowers in the distance—vast spirals with radiant hearts, their arms trailing stardust and time.Nebulae hung like bruised fire across the heavens, clouds of gas and light the size of realms, swirling in shades of lavender, rose, and stormlit jade.
Twin Moons hung in the corner of the sky.
A constellation in the shape of a dying dragon flared overhead, its tail coiled around a sun. Another, a broken crown, shimmered faintly near the horizon—one Astra had only seen sketched in crumbling tomes.
There were no edges to the sky.It went on forever.
And something in him—a part buried, neglected, and long ignored—awakened.
He fell to his knees.
Not in pain.But in reverence.
He felt the nourishment of the stars, he felt them, his source element.
The sky began to glow a little brighter...
His breath trembled. His hands did too.
"This... is what the stars really look like," he whispered. "This is what they've hidden from me…"
The heavens whispered in return. Not in words, but in silence so perfect, it felt like song.
He could see them now—the threads, thin and vast, flowing from star to star like a cosmic loom.Each thread pulsed faintly with life and time and intention.
And for a moment, Astra understood why the ancient ones called it the Celestial Tapestry.
He felt impossibly small. And yet, for the first time in his life, rightly placed.As if the night had waited for him to see it.
"oh gods."
And above him, one constellation pulsed—gently, knowingly.
It looked like a closed eye, carved of sapphire flame.
And it was watching him back.
Astra for the first time ever, witnessed the full majesty of his inheritance, his domain, his destiny.
The night sky.
Astra remained on his knees for a long time, breath slow, heartbeat steadying.
Under the open sky, beneath that impossible canvas of stars, he felt it—Power.
Like mist soaking into dry roots, the starlight sank into him.It didn't scream. It didn't blaze.It simply was, and in its presence, so was he.
His mana stirred, resonating.The blessing of Curiosity flared faintly, then settled.His body felt lighter, mind sharper, the ever-present ache in his bones gone. Even his breath felt deeper, cleaner.
This, he thought, is what I was meant to feel.
He slowly stood, dusting sand from his legs. The desert stretched out endlessly around him—rolling dunes of silver sand under a sea of galaxies. No landmarks, no ruins. Just isolation. Pristine, and untouched.
"Huh. How strange…" he murmured, his voice nearly swallowed by the breeze.
But then—
The wind shifted.
And the mana did too.
He tensed.
A faint tremor pulsed beneath the sand. At first subtle. Then rhythmic. Then violent. The grains began to aerate, floating unnaturally in the air like reversed hourglass dust.
A sinister pressure gripped his mind—cold and ancient, vast like something that had slumbered for eons.
Astra winced, clutching his skull."Shit—what is that—?"
And then it hit him.
He had dismissed the artifact.
"No no no no—fuck, fuck," he hissed, panic rising. "Why did I unsummon the artifact!?"
Frantically, he reached into his core, calling to the Starfinder. Another charge burned as the astralobe surged back into the air, its rings spinning, celestial light flaring to life. Glyphs rotated. Sigils aligned.
Too late.
The dune ahead ruptured, like a god had punched the world from beneath.
And then it emerged.
A sand worm, but that word didn't do it justice. This was no mere monster—it was colossal, its scales shifting like obsidian armor, veined with molten gold. Its maw could swallow a keep whole, lined with fangs like curved sabers.
Its eyes—if they were eyes—were glowing slits along its sides, runes pulsing between them.
And Astra knew, instantly:
Rank Five. Saint-level.
A being that could flatten cities. Break legacies.And it had seen him.
"Oh gods," Astra whispered, as the creature reared, parting the clouds of stars with its rise.
A voice boomed—not from its mouth, but within his mind.
"Oh? A mere Rank Two... in my domain? How imprudent."
Astra's knees buckled under the pressure of its presence, its mana pressing down like an ocean flipped upside down, trying to crush him.
"What the actual fuck," Astra gasped, the curse barely audible.
The worm coiled in the air, then dived, the sand parting like liquid as it descended toward him like a falling star.
Astra didn't have time to scream.
The astralobe flared.The spell completed.And he vanished—a sliver of light whipped away into the void.
Astra opened his eyes.
He felt cold.Really cold.
"I-I'm alive," he gasped, shuddering as breath escaped in a plume of frost. Relief surged through his chest like fire—But it didn't last.
His smile dropped.
The sky above him was ash-gray, choked with smoke and swirling clouds. The air was thin, sharp, almost metallic. Jagged mountain peaks surrounded him like the jaws of some ancient beast. Snow swept across the rocky terrain, clashing with veins of molten lava that oozed from shattered cliffs.
This wasn't the deep desert anymore.
It was Apu.
And worse—
He hadn't landed in silence.
He'd landed in a warzone.
Not one of mortals.Not of soldiers or cities.
But of Demi-gods.
Two figures clashed in the distance.
On one side: a dwarf, massive even for his kind, draped in pitch-black armor that steamed from the heat of his own body. In his hands, a warhammer the size of a house, wreathed in roaring crimson flame. his helmet adorned with a crimson red crown.
The flame of the War God—Tyr. This was a bishop of the Guild of War
He brought his hammer down.
A mountainside collapsed under the strike, stone splitting like dry bark.
His opponent blurred through the sky—a woman, human in shape but divine in essence. Her skin shimmered with the hue of frostbitten ivory, and where she moved, the world turned pale.
She didn't dodge.
She retaliated.
A single punch—elegant, clean—struck the dwarf square in the chest, sending him hurtling across the mountain range. He crashed through three peaks, vanishing into a volcano that erupted a moment later.
Astra stood frozen, every instinct screaming at him to run, hide, vanish.
"What... what is this…" he breathed, trembling. His eyes could barely follow them, his mana felt like a candle in a hurricane.
The woman rose higher into the sky, arms spread. Her hair flowed like liquid snow, and a ring of ice and mist formed around her.
When she spoke, the world shook.
"Ice Age."
The sky groaned.
The wind howled.
And a blizzard unlike anything Astra had ever felt crashed across the mountains. It wasn't just cold—it was tyrannical, elemental, It aimed to freeze all.
Astra dropped to his knees, shielding his eyes as visibility dropped to nothing. His fingers went numb. His breaths turned to ice in his throat.
He needed to leave.Now.
He activated the astralobe once more, burning another precious charge. The rings spun, light cracked through the storm—
And then he heard it.
The dwarf's voice—deep, gravelly, infuriatingly amused—echoed through the storm.
"Bah… yer wind barely makes me feel a chill, wench."
From somewhere beyond the blizzard, the volcano erupted again, this time not from magma—
But from warfire.
It howled into the heavens like a phoenix's scream, clearing half the storm in a single detonation. A tidal wave of crimson light poured over the peaks, melting glaciers in an instant.
And from it stepped the dwarf, wreathed in fire, hammer on his shoulder, a grin full of madness on his face.
"Let's go, wench."
In the blink of an eye, they vanished—colliding again in a new place, far too fast for Astra to track.
The shockwave that followed turned half the mountains to rubble.
Astra barely teleported in time.
Astra hit the ground with a grunt.
The air was hot. Humid.Salt clung to his skin, and sweat beaded on his brow almost instantly.
"Where the hell..." he muttered, rising to his feet.
He was on a mountaintop—no, a sea-cliff island—lush, wild, and impossibly beautiful. Tropical flowers bloomed in clusters, and pale white stone jutted from the greenery like the bones of some slumbering giant. The sea below sparkled like molten sapphire.
But it wasn't the view that held his gaze.
It was the war.
Two massive fleets clashed across the sea below him—each a mix of water-bound dreadnoughts and floating ships, their sails glowing with arcane runes. Mana cannons flared, streaks of lightning arced across the sky, and enormous magical beasts swam below the surface, disrupting the battle like sea serpents from myth.
Mages hovered in the air, weaving spells. Elemental avatars clashed in storms of wind and flame. The banners of rival houses flapped in the wind—sigils unfamiliar to Astra, yet undeniably royal.
It was nothing short of breathtaking.
Astra gave a dry, tired chuckle.
"Heh. Gods. Finally... nothing trying to kill me right now."
He shouldn't have said it.
He felt it—beneath him.
A pressure. A hum. A presence.
"Shit," he whispered.
And then the island exploded.
Two figures crashed into it from above, their descent splitting the land like clay under a divine hammer. The impact rippled through the island—trees vaporized, cliffs shattered, and the very earth screamed as it cracked.
The fleet froze.
Even amidst the chaos, the battle paused.
Tier Ones, Twos, Threes—none dared interfere. Everyone knew what was happening.Two Rank Fours.
Demigods.
Both were male. One, scaled like a dragon, his tail sweeping behind him like a living whip of obsidian and emerald. The other was avian—a man with wings of starlight feathers and a face too sharp, too perfect, to be fully human.
But it was his eyes that made Astra's heart stutter.
Even across the wrecked island.
Eyes like blades of wind, full of judgment and precision.
A scion of House Ouranos—rulers of the sky, the untouchable royals of Wai.
The clash began instantly.
Sky and earth tore apart.
Winds howled, lightning danced, and entire sections of the island were flung into the ocean like toy debris. The demigods fought with the fury of storms, and the world bent around them.
Despite himself, Astra sighed.
He was drenched, half-burned, and standing on the remains of a mountain that was quickly ceasing to exist.
"Alright, alright," he muttered. "Lesson learned. Stop teleporting randomly."
He closed his eyes, focused on home Sahara—on his room, the scent of ink and parchment, the calm of shadowed silence.
The Celestial Starfinder whirred in his hands, spinning wildly, its rings aligning once more. A faint light pulsed, shimmering with cosmic threads.
One more charge burned.
And Astra vanished just before a chunk of the mountain collapsed into the sea.
Astra stumbled into his quarters, the familiar hush of Estate wrapping around him like a long-lost friend.
Somehow, he was alive.In one piece.Battered, shaken, but alive.
He stood there for a moment, drenched in seawater, ash, and starlight. The Starfinder pulsed faintly in his palm—still warm, still humming from the string of near-deaths it had just dragged him through.
War.Real war. Not duels or skirmishes.Total, apocalyptic, realm-shattering war.
And he'd barely scratched the surface.
He muttered a curse and tossed the artifact onto his desk, its orrery rings spinning lazily in the air, like it had done nothing at all.
It was starting to dawn on him.This wasn't just a relic.It was a key.A weapon.A path to anywhere.
And more than that... it let him hide.
Even angelic beings hadn't sensed him until he activated it..
He ran a hand through his tangled, salt-soaked hair and let out a long, exhausted sigh.
"…My ancestors weren't playing games."
It was clear now. He wasn't just holding a powerful artifact—he was holding a legacy, a plan still in motion, threads laid centuries ago now tangling around his fate.
Astra grabbed a bottle from the cold shelf—alcoholic lemonade, of course. Tart, fizzy, and just strong enough to remind him he was still mortal.
He stripped off the shredded remains of his outfit and stepped into the shower. The water hit like heaven. The grime of three realms washed away, but not the weight of what he'd seen.
After, towel draped around his shoulders, drink in hand, he flopped down into his chair and opened the Mana Network.
Dozens of messages awaited—tournament alerts, political news, coded letters from contacts, and a few from Vesper marked "idiot" and "stop dying."
He scrolled lazily, taking a long sip, the citrus burning down his throat. But his eyes kept drifting back to the Starfinder.
He could go anywhere.
But for the first time…He was starting to wonder if anywhere was safe.