They Ruled the Cosmos, We Became the Inferno They Feared

The night sky wasn’t supposed to blink. But it did. Just once. Like some bored god pressed the wrong button on a cosmic remote. One moment, stars burned steady. Next, the whole ceiling of the universe hiccuped. Kaelen Veyra noticed. Of course he did. He’d been staring at that fake sky since birth, the way you stare at a painting long enough until you know which brushstroke doesn’t belong. And trust me, the Dominion doesn’t “make mistakes.” They build perfection. They force it. So when the stars twitched, so did his brain. A crackle. Like static in his skull. Then—images. Blurry, fast, wrong. A blue ocean he’d never swum in. Birds that weren’t drones. Green hills that weren’t hydro-domes. He almost puked from it. The chip. His chip. The Dominion’s leash. It glitched. “Veyra! Eyes front!” Instructor Holst barked like every teacher in the Dominion did: with too much spit and too little patience. Kaelen’s classmates snickered. He didn’t even care. His temples were pounding, and he could still hear… waves? Actual waves, crashing in his skull. And here’s the thing. He’d read about oceans. Everyone had, in the Dominion’s filtered history texts. Oceans had been poisoned centuries ago, then erased. Humanity left Earth, abandoned it like an old shoe, and never looked back. That’s the story. The only story. So why the hell was he seeing them now? “Sorry, Instructor,” Kaelen mumbled, though his voice shook. Holst squinted. Maybe he sensed something off, maybe not. Instructors weren’t meant to notice. They were meant to drill, to hammer, to break. But Kaelen could feel the prick of surveillance on his skin—cameras in the corners, drones humming overhead. The Dominion was always watching. Always. And yet. For the first time in seventeen years, Kaelen felt like he was the one peeking behind their curtain. And it terrified him. And excited him. Both, like a dangerous cocktail. --- That night, he couldn’t sleep. He lay in his pod—white walls, white ceiling, white sheets, everything sanitized to the point of suffocation. Dominion housing was like living inside a coffin, only more polite about it. The glitch came back in dreams. Earth, alive. Cities that didn’t look like the Dominion’s sterile steel towers. Street food, actual street food, with smoke and spice curling into the night. He could taste it. Not the bland nutrition packs shoved down his throat daily, but flavor. Sweat, salt, joy. He woke up gasping. Heart racing. And then—he heard it. Not in his head this time. A whisper. Do you remember? Kaelen froze. The voice wasn’t his. It wasn’t the chip’s cold monotone either. It was warm. Human. Maybe female. Maybe older. It carried the weight of something ancient. He sat up so fast he cracked his head on the pod ceiling. “Ow—sh*t.” No response. Just silence. But the air felt charged. Like someone had left the door open between worlds. That’s when he knew: something inside him was broken. Or fixed. Depending on how you looked at it. --- Outside, the city hummed like a machine trying too hard to sound alive. Neon signs flashed propaganda slogans. “OBEDIENCE IS FREEDOM.” “THE DOMINION SEES ALL.” Great. Comforting. And Kaelen? He stared at those words, eyes burning, fists clenched, and thought— What if they don’t? What if for once… they don’t see me? And that thought—tiny, fragile, reckless—was the most dangerous glitch of all.

Kaelen’s eyes snapped open.

Kaelen’s eyes snapped open. Not in his pod this time. Not alone. The alley smelled like burnt metal and rainwater. Neon buzzed overhead, jagged letters flickering in a language that wasn’t quite English, wasn’t quite anything he’d learned in school. “C.O.R.E. Supplies,” one sign read, sputtering like it had been begging for electricity for a week. He squinted. The Dominion city sprawled above and around him like a beast with a hundred glowing eyes. Skyscrapers twisted into impossible angles, glass and steel spiraling up so high the clouds looked like they were crawling over rooftops instead of floating. The streets below were rivers of light. Hovercars hummed and dipped, leaving streaks of red and green, like someone had spilled a neon rainbow and forgotten to clean it up. And yet… in the shadows between the towers, the city felt alive in a human way. Not Dominion-alive. Not perfect. Rats darted between trash bins, tiny sparks from exposed wires catching on their fur. Steam hissed from drains. People moved like ants with secrets, heads down, eyes flicking side to side. Aria stepped out from the shadows. Her boots clanged against the wet pavement. She didn’t bother with greetings. Didn’t even glance at him, really. But Kaelen felt it—the kind of presence that makes the hairs on your neck stand up. Dangerous. Smart. Reckless. “Keep up, glitch-boy,” she said. And yeah, she called him that, because apparently everyone in the rebel cells had nicknames designed to sting. Her tone was casual, like she wasn’t asking. She was telling. They moved through streets where walls were covered in propaganda posters—faces of Archons smiling too wide, teeth perfect, eyes sharper than knives. “REMEMBER YOUR PLACE,” one shouted. Another flickered halfway between slogans, half burned, half intact, like the city itself couldn’t decide what to say anymore. Kaelen noticed the smell too. Smoke from a food stall, something spicy, something meat-like. He froze. Hunger hit him like a sucker punch. Not the bland nutrition packs he’d gotten since birth. Real food. Real smells. Real life. Above them, cables and wires twisted like tangled veins. Drones zipped along them, scanning. Lights reflected off puddles on the cracked pavement, multiplying themselves into tiny mirrors of a world he’d never seen before. And through it all, faint laughter—real laughter—slipped from a doorway somewhere behind a wall of flickering advertisements. The city wasn’t safe. Not by a long shot. But it was… alive. Messy, unpredictable, loud. Human. And Kaelen realized, as he followed Aria into another narrow passage, that he hadn’t felt this way—truly awake—ever. ---

Aria Solenne She remembered the fire first. Not the flames, not yet, but the smell—faint, acrid, like plastic melting over metal. She was six. Her parents dragged her to the lower levels of their apartment, whispering words she didn’t understand, telling her to breathe slow, stay quiet. Above them, Dominion drones hummed like swarms of angry hornets. A blast, a scream, then silence. When she emerged, the apartment was empty. Her parents… gone. Vaporized. Erased. No trace left. By the time she was sixteen, she could steal ships, hack navigation grids, and vanish through storm-lit cityscapes like a phantom. Her laugh was sharp, almost cruel—but it hid the ache of a younger sister she never saw again, a memory erased by the Dominion. Jaren “Rust” Kallis Rust’s hands shook the first time he detonated a charge for the rebels. Not from fear—but from memory. He had been a miner, scraping uranium-laced rocks deep under a Dominion colony. Supervisors pushed him, forced him, until the walls t