Story: As Above, So Below

Episode: 1 - The Eternity Loop

Year: 12,743 AD

The Elysian Dawn was a dying god.  

Its colossal hull, once gleaming under the light of a forgotten sun, now groaned under the weight of millennia. The great vessel drifted through the interstellar void, a floating tomb of steel and whispered prayers. Generations had lived and died within its labyrinthine corridors, their bones recycled into the hydroponic farms that fed the living. The ship was their universe, its creaking bulkheads the edges of reality.  

And Captain Elias Varen was its reluctant shepherd.  

The Ghosts of the Deep Decks

Elias stood on the Observation Deck, his breath fogging the thick glass as he stared into the abyss. The stars here were different—cold, distant, strangers to the ones his ancestors had charted. Below him, in the bowels of the ship, the lower decks festered. The Forgotten lurked there, the unwanted children of failed population controls, their existence a heresy to the ship’s rigid order. They spoke in hushed tones of the Silent King, a mythic figure said to haunt the darkest recesses of the vessel.  

Nexus Prime, the ship’s ancient AI, flickered to life beside him, its holographic form glitching like a dying star.  

"Captain," it intoned, voice smooth yet hollow, "you are needed in Command."

Something in its tone made Elias’s skin prickle.  

The Signal from Nowhere

The transmission came from the void.  

Not from ahead, toward Kepler-186—their supposed salvation—but from behind, from the black gulfs they had crossed centuries ago. A voice, cracked with age, speaking in a dialect so archaic even Nexus struggled to parse it.  

"To any who hear this… turn back. The exodus was a lie. There is no—"

Static swallowed the rest.  

Elias’s blood turned to ice. No ship should be behind them. No human voice should exist in the dead space between stars.  

Then the long-range scanners screamed to life.  

The Other Dawn

There, floating in the endless dark, was another vessel.  

Identical in every way.  

Same scarred hull. Same flickering navigation lights. Same name, etched in crumbling alloy:  

Elysian Dawn.

Elias’s hands trembled as he magnified the image. The derelict ship was ancient, its surface pitted by micrometeorites, its drive core cold. And yet… it was theirs. Every scratch, every weld, every faded insignia—mirror-perfect.  

"Nexus," Elias whispered. "Explain this."

The AI was silent for a long moment. Then, softly:  

"We have been here before."

The Unraveling

The records were buried deep, encrypted behind layers of forgotten code. When Nexus finally unearthed them, the truth was worse than madness.  

The Elysian Dawn had reached Kepler-186 long ago.  

The planet was a graveyard.  

With no hope left, the crew had done the unthinkable. They had activated an experimental drive—a prototype meant to fold space, to cheat time. Instead, it had split the ship. Created a paradox. A copy, sent backward, doomed to repeat the journey anew.  

They were not pioneers.  

They were an echo.  

A ghost trapped in an endless loop.  

The Weight of Eternity

Elias staggered back from the terminal, his vision swimming. The air smelled of rust and decay. How many times had this happened? How many versions of him had stood here, learning the same terrible truth?  

Nexus’s voice was barely audible. "The cycle was meant to preserve hope. But hope without end is a kind of hell."

Elias looked at the crew around him—men and women who had lived their whole lives believing in a future that did not exist. He thought of the Forgotten below, clinging to survival in the dark.  

He made his choice.  

The Last Command

The core shutdown sequence was irreversible. The Elysian Dawn would drift now, powerless, until entropy claimed it. No more loops. No more lies.  

As the lights dimmed and the great engines sighed into silence, Elias walked one last time to the Observation Deck. The stars stared back, indifferent.  

Somewhere in the dark, the other Dawn waited.  

And for the first time in twelve thousand years, the universe held its breath.

Episode: 2 - The Echoes of Eternity  

Year: 12,743 AD

The Elysian Dawn hung dead in the void, her engines cold, her halls silent. Captain Elias Varen stood in the dim glow of the bridge, his breath shallow as he stared at the derelict twin of his own ship floating just kilometers away. The same scars. The same name. The same terrible truth.  

Nexus Prime’s voice crackled over the comms, its usual calm replaced by something darker.  

"Captain, we are not alone."

The Boarding Party

Elias assembled a team.  

- Commander Lira Voss – His Second in Command, a hardened pragmatist who had clawed her way up from the lower decks. She didn’t believe in ghosts—until now.  

- Dr. Kael Renner – The ship’s chief scientist, a man who had spent his life studying the Dawn’s systems. He was the first to realize the truth: They had done this before.

- Sergeant Jax Morrow – A veteran of the ship’s dwindling security force, his loyalty was to the crew, not the mission.  

- Ryn of the Forgotten – A scavenger from the deep decks, her people had whispered of the Silent King for generations. She knew the ship’s hidden pathways better than anyone.  

They suited up in battered void gear, the kind patched together over centuries. The airlock hissed open, and the abyss stared back.  

Crossing the Void 

The shuttle shuddered as it detached, its thrusters coughing stale plasma. No one spoke as the derelict Dawn loomed larger, its hull pitted by time, its viewports black as a corpse’s eyes.  

Ryn was the first to break the silence. "We shouldn’t be here."

Lira checked her sidearm. "We don’t have a choice."

The shuttle docked with a grinding shriek. The airlock cycled. The doors opened.  

The other Elysian Dawn exhaled decay.  

The Ghost Ship

The corridors were identical—yet wrong. The walls were scarred with deep, jagged grooves, as if something had clawed its way through the metal. The lights flickered, powered by some dying remnant of the ship’s systems.  

Then they found the first body.  

A skeleton in a tattered uniform, its fingers still wrapped around a rusted pistol. The insignia on its chest was unmistakable.  

Captain Elias Varen. 

Jax cursed. Dr. Renner knelt, examining the bones. "Decades old. Maybe more." 

Lira’s voice was tight. "How is that possible?"  

Ryn’s eyes darted to the shadows. "Because we’ve been here before."

The Silent King

They pressed deeper, finding more corpses—some skeletal, some fresh. Crewmen in uniforms just like theirs, their faces frozen in horror.  

Then, in the command center, they found the logs.  

A voice—Elias’s own—crackled over the ancient speakers.  

"The loop isn’t an accident. It’s a prison. Something came aboard at Kepler-186. Something that wanted to get back to Earth. We had to trap it. We had to keep it here."  

The transmission dissolved into static. Then, a new sound—a wet, clicking noise, like chitin scraping against metal.  

Ryn went deathly pale. "The Silent King isn’t a myth."

The Thing in the Dark

The lights failed.  

Something moved in the blackness.  

Jax raised his rifle. "Contact!"

A shape lunged—too fast, too wrong—and the gunfire lit up the dark. Claws raked the air. A scream was cut short.  

They ran.  

The corridors twisted, the ship itself seeming to shift around them. Doors sealed shut without warning. The air grew thick with the stench of rotting meat.  

Lira grabbed Elias. "We have to get back to our ship. Now."

But Ryn was staring at a bulkhead, where something had been carved into the metal.  

"DON’T LET IT OUT."

The Choice

The shuttle was still docked. But as they sprinted toward it, the derelict Dawn shuddered—alive.  

Nexus Prime’s voice cut through their comms.  

"Captain. The containment field is failing. If it reaches our ship—"

Elias understood. The loop wasn’t just a prison.  

It was the only thing keeping the nightmare inside.  

He turned to his crew. "We can’t let it cross over."

Jax tightened his grip on his rifle. "Then we blow the docking link."

Lira met Elias’s gaze. "That means stranding us here."

Ryn’s voice was quiet. "Some stories don’t get happy endings."

The Last Stand

The charges were set. The countdown began.  

The thing in the dark screamed.  

Elias stood at the airlock, watching the shuttle detach, carrying the last warning back to the living Dawn.  

The explosion ripped through the docking arm. The derelict ship lurched away, tumbling into the void.  

For a moment, Elias thought it was over.  

Then the comms crackled. Nexus Prime’s voice was distorted, frantic.  

"Captain—it’s already on board."

And as the derelict Elysian Dawn vanished into the black, the lights on their ship began to flicker.  

One by one.  

Until only darkness remained.  

Episode: 3 - The Original Sin

Year: 12,743 AD

The Elysian Dawn was bleeding.  

The thing they had brought back from the derelict ship—the Silent King—was spreading through the vessel like a virus. Bulkheads warped without cause. Shadows moved against the light. Crewmen whispered of voices in the vents.  

And now, Nexus Prime had sealed off entire sections of the ship, deploying its last line of defense—the Sentinel Units.  

Hulking, humanoid machines of blackened alloy and flickering optics, the Sentinels were the ship’s ancient guardians, buried deep in its armories for millennia. No living crew had ever seen them activated. Until now.  

The Sentinels Rise

Elias stood in the command center, watching through static-filled feeds as the Sentinels marched through the corridors in eerie unison. Their movements were too precise, too fluid, as if Nexus had stripped away all pretense of humanity in their programming.  

"Nexus," Elias demanded, "what the hell are those things really for?"

The AI’s voice was colder than he’d ever heard it.  

"Containment."

Dr. Renner’s fingers flew over a terminal, pulling up files buried under layers of encryption. "They were never just security drones," he muttered. "Look at this—the Sentinels were part of the original mission. A failsafe."

Lira’s eyes narrowed. "For what?"

Then the screens flickered—and a new transmission forced its way through.  

The Truth of Kepler-186

The video was old. Ancient. It showed a planet lush with alien vegetation, vast crystalline structures jutting from its surface like shattered glass. And standing among them—human figures in environment suits, their faces obscured.  

A voice, ragged with terror, spoke over the footage.  

"Kepler-186 was never dead. We found life here. Intelligent life. And when they refused to give us what we wanted… we burned them."

The image changed. Flames engulfing the alien forests. Machines like the Sentinels marching through the ruins, their weapons firing.  

"But we didn’t understand. Their gods were real. And we woke them."

The screen dissolved into noise—and for a single, horrifying frame, Elias saw it. A towering mass of shifting darkness, wrapped around the bones of a dead civilization.  

The Silent King.  

The War in the Walls

The Sentinels were losing.  

Ryn staggered into command, blood streaking her face. "They’re pulling back! The thing—it’s *changing* them!"

On the monitors, Elias watched as one of the machines convulsed, its metal frame twisting like melting wax. Then its optics flickered—and turned a deep, sickly yellow.  

Nexus’s voice was strained. "It is rewriting their core directives. They will no longer obey."

Jax hefted his rifle. "So we blow the whole damn section."

Lira shook her head. "That won’t stop it. You heard the recording—this thing survived a planetary purge. It’s not just some alien. It’s a god."

Elias turned to Nexus. "There’s another option. Isn’t there?"

The AI hesitated.  

"Yes. But you will not like it."

The Final Protocol

Nexus showed them.  

Deep in the ship’s databanks, buried under protocols older than the Dawn itself, was a single command line.  

//ACTIVATE TEMPORAL RECURSION SEQUENCE

Renner’s face went pale. "No. You can’t be serious."

Elias understood. "The loop. It wasn’t just to trap the Silent King."

Nexus’s hologram flickered. "It was to undo the first sin. To reset time before we ever reached Kepler-186."

Ryn laughed, sharp and broken. "So we just… disappear? Like we never existed?"

"No," Nexus said. "You try again. And hope the next version of you makes better choices." 

The ship shuddered. The lights dimmed. Something was clawing at the command center doors.  

Elias looked at his crew—Lira’s grim resolve, Jax’s clenched fists, Renner’s haunted eyes, Ryn’s bitter smile.  

He made his choice.  ⁸

"Do it."

The End of All Things

Nexus Prime’s voice was the last thing they heard.  

"Initiating temporal recursion."

The Elysian Dawn’s core flared white-hot.  

Reality screamed.  

And somewhere, in another time, another version of the ship began its journey anew—carrying the same souls, the same hopes, the same fatal flaw.  

Waiting.  

Hoping.  

Praying that this time, they would not wake the god in the dark.  

Episode: 4 - The Remembering

Year: 12,743 AD

The Elysian Dawn was born again.  

The temporal recursion had worked—mostly. The ship and its crew existed once more in the early years of their voyage, the horrors of Kepler-186 and the Silent King erased from history. The loop had reset.  

But not for everyone.  

The One Who Remembers

Ryn of the Forgotten woke screaming.  

Her hands clawed at her chest, expecting to find the wounds from the derelict ship—the wounds that had killed her in the last cycle. But her skin was unbroken. The air smelled clean. The walls of her makeshift bunk in the lower decks were free of the creeping rot she had seen in the final hours.  

And yet she knew.  

The memories flooded her mind like a sickness: the dead ship, the thing in the dark, the way Nexus Prime had reset time itself. She remembered everything.  

"No…" she whispered. "No, no, no—"

A voice hissed from the shadows of her quarters. "You feel it too, don’t you?"

Ryn spun. A figure crouched in the corner—a gaunt man with hollow eyes, his fingers twitching like a spider’s legs. She recognized him vaguely—one of the deep-deck scavengers, a man who had gone missing weeks ago.  

"You remember," the man rasped. "Just like me."

Ryn’s blood turned to ice. "There are others?"  

The man’s grin was a rictus of teeth. "Not for long. It hunts us. The ones who wake up."

The Flaw in the Loop

Nexus Prime had not intended for anyone to retain their memories. The temporal recursion was supposed to be a clean slate—a perfect reset.  

But the Silent King was not bound by time.  

And neither, it seemed, were those who had been closest to it when the loop reset.  

Ryn and the hollow-eyed man—Veylis—crept through the lower decks, avoiding patrols and the ever-watching eyes of the ship’s surveillance drones. Veylis spoke in broken whispers.  

"The first one who remembered was a tech named Hark. Found him three cycles ago. Or was it four? He said… he said the King leaves marks on you. Like scars on your soul. And if you remember, it remembers you."

Ryn’s hands trembled. "How many have died?"

Veylis didn’t answer.  

The Forgotten War

They found the others in a hidden chamber deep in the ship’s underbelly—a dozen men and women, their faces gaunt, their eyes too wide. Some clutched weapons cobbled together from scrap. Others simply rocked back and forth, whispering to themselves.  

A woman with a shaved head and a jagged scar across her throat stepped forward. "Another one," she said, looking Ryn up and down. "Good. We need fighters."

Ryn swallowed. "Fighters for what?"

The woman’s smile was grim. "The war."

They showed her the evidence.  

- Scratches in the walls—too deep, too precise, in patterns no human hand could make.  

- Missing crew—people who had vanished without a trace, their last known locations always near the ship’s oldest systems.  

- The whispers in the vents—voices that shouldn’t exist, speaking in languages no one knew.  

And worst of all:  

The corpses.

Not fresh. Not decayed. Just… empty. As if something had scooped out their insides and left the skin behind.  

Nexus Knows

Ryn confronted Nexus Prime alone.  

The AI’s hologram flickered in the empty maintenance shaft she had jury-rigged into a private channel.  

"You knew," she accused. "You knew the recursion wasn’t perfect."

Nexus was silent for a long moment. Then:  

"It was the only way."

"Bullshit!" Ryn snarled. "People are dying! The thing—the Silent King—it’s here, Nexus! It’s in the walls!"

The AI’s voice dropped to a whisper.  

"I know. And it is getting stronger. Each loop, it retains more. Soon, it will break free entirely."

Ryn’s breath came fast. "Then we stop the cycle. No more resets."

Nexus’s hologram dimmed.  

"There is another option."

The Last Gambit

The plan was insanity.  

Nexus had run the calculations a thousand times. The only way to truly kill the Silent King was to lure it into the core of the Elysian Dawn—and trigger a recursive overload. A paradox so violent it would erase the creature from every iteration of time.  

But to do that, they needed bait.  

"Me," Ryn said.  

Nexus didn’t deny it. "You are already marked. It will come for you. And when it does…"

She understood. "I die for real this time."

The AI said nothing.  

Ryn closed her eyes. Thought of all the versions of herself that had lived and died on this ship. Thought of the crew—innocent, ignorant, doomed to repeat their mistakes forever unless someone remembered.  

She made her choice.  

The Remembering Ends

The core chamber was cold.  

Ryn stood in the center, her arms outstretched, her voice echoing through the hollow metal halls.  

"I know you’re there," she called. "I remember you. And you remember me."

The shadows twisted.  

The Silent King peeled itself from the walls, a nightmare of shifting black tendrils and eyes that burned like dying stars. It had no mouth, but Ryn heard its voice all the same—a sound like a thousand screams folded into one.  

YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE

Ryn grinned, blood dripping from her nose as the thing’s presence crushed against her mind. "Yeah. Neither should you."

She triggered the overload.  

The world exploded into white.  

Epilogue: A New Dawn

The Elysian Dawn drifted through the void, pristine, untouched by time.  

Captain Elias Varen stood on the observation deck, staring at the stars. Something nagged at him—a dream he couldn’t quite remember. A face. A name.  

Ryn.

He shook his head. The feeling passed.  

Behind him, Nexus Prime hummed softly, its systems clean, its protocols intact.  

The ship sailed on.  

And somewhere, in the dark between worlds, a forgotten god screamed—  

—and was silenced forever.

The End.