Rhex: Beyond the Forbidden Veil
There are roads in the Cosmos that were never meant to be travelled.
The CryptoWeb is one of the greatest of them.
To most civilizations, it is invisible: an immeasurable lattice of energy and information connecting the countless CryptaSpheres that contain the Universes of the Multiverse-Z. It does not resemble a road, a tunnel or a river, and yet, in ways few mortal species fully understand, it behaves as all three.
The CryptoWeb carries connection across impossibly distant realms.
Signals.
Energy.
Resonance.
Perhaps even memory.
For most species, it is something to detect, study or revere.
The Sylvani had learned to sail through it.
And that achievement had made them one of the most extraordinary peoples in Elyndra.
The Sylvani
The Sylvani had never believed that technology and the sacred needed to become enemies.
Their ancestors had followed Skuda, learning to perceive the invisible structures woven through nature, spirit and consciousness. Their forests had temples long before they had laboratories. Their earliest scholars mapped the movements of spiritual energy long before anyone understood how to manipulate gravity.
Then came Futura.
The Sylvani did not reject it.
They absorbed it.
Their sciences grew around the older knowledge rather than replacing it.
Machines were developed according to patterns found in living organisms.
Quantum computation was combined with spiritual resonance.
Starships were not merely assembled.
In some cases, parts of them were grown.
A Sylvani vessel could contain synthetic intelligence beside living crystalline networks, biological hull components beside engineered alloys, and navigation systems capable of interpreting phenomena that another civilisation might simply call magic.
That made their civilisation:
SKUDA-FUTURA · ORDO.
Their Ordo was elegant rather than militaristic.
Balance.
Precision.
Measured action.
Responsibility.
The Sylvani believed knowledge without restraint was merely another form of ignorance.
And few embodied that philosophy better than Rhex.
RHEX
Rhex was a Ranger.
Not because she wandered forests hunting beasts.
The concept meant something much greater among the Sylvani.
A Ranger went where maps ended.
Rhex could track movement across physical terrain, atmospheric layers, energy fields and—given the right equipment—even the boundaries between Universes.
She carried a slender blade designed for close combat and a precision weapon capable of firing condensed energy across extraordinary distances.
But her greatest weapon was perception.
Rhex noticed things.
Tiny things.
A change in someone's breathing.
A vibration through a hull.
A star whose spectrum was slightly wrong.
A pattern occurring one fraction of a second too late.
It was why she had been chosen to command exploratory operations aboard the Aevum, one of Elyndra's rare CryptoWeb-capable vessels.
Its crew numbered twenty-three.
Explorers.
Scientists.
Navigators.
Rangers.
Friends.
Some had spent years together.
None of them knew they were about to disappear.
The Anomaly
The mission should have been routine.
As routine as travelling between Universes could ever become.
The Aevum entered the CryptoWeb through an established Sylvani convergence point, intending to emerge near a remote CryptaSphere whose energetic behaviour had been under observation for decades.
Everything proceeded normally for forty-three seconds.
Then the navigator said:
“That's not ours.”
Rhex looked up.
“What?”
A pattern had appeared ahead.
The CryptoWeb did not possess colours in the ordinary sense, but Sylvani navigation systems translated energetic conditions into visual forms that their minds could process.
Known routes appeared as luminous structures extending through darkness.
Ahead of the Aevum was something different.
A portal.
Black at its centre.
Surrounded by a halo of energy that seemed to consume the surrounding CryptoWeb rather than participate in it.
The navigator's hands moved quickly across the controls.
“No identification.”
“Then disengage.”
“I can't.”
Rhex stood.
“Why?”
The vessel lurched.
Alarms erupted.
Something had caught them.
Not gravity.
Not exactly.
A pull deeper than physical force.
The Aevum rotated violently as the surrounding CryptoWeb stretched into impossible geometries.
“Reverse thrust.”
“No response.”
“Collapse the traversal field.”
“It won't collapse!”
Another crew member shouted:
“Commander, the portal is pulling energy directly from the core!”
Rhex stared towards the black opening.
Every instinct told her the same thing.
Do not enter.
“Emergency severance.”
The navigator looked at her.
“That could destroy the ship.”
“Do it.”
He initiated the sequence.
Nothing happened.
The black portal expanded.
Or perhaps they moved towards it.
There was no way to know.
For an instant Rhex felt something behind her eyes.
A pressure.
An awareness.
As though the darkness ahead had become conscious of their presence.
Then the Aevum crossed the threshold.
And the CryptoWeb disappeared.
The Forbidden Universe
Silence.
Not ordinary silence.
The kind that makes the absence of sound feel intentional.
The ship floated above a star system nobody aboard had ever seen.
Rhex looked through the forward display.
The stars were wrong.
Their positions corresponded to no catalogued region of Elyndra.
No known Universe.
No authorised exploration zone.
Nothing.
“Locate the CryptaSphere signature.”
The navigation officer stared at his instruments.
“I can't.”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn't registered.”
“Everything is registered.”
“Apparently not this.”
Rhex walked towards him.
“Can we return through the portal?”
“No portal detected.”
The crew became very quiet.
Rhex forced her voice to remain calm.
“Determine our position.”
Minutes passed.
Then one of the researchers whispered:
“Commander.”
Rhex turned.
She was staring at a restricted navigation layer.
Ancient Sylvani data.
Information so old that most citizens considered parts of it mythology.
One symbol pulsed beside the unknown readings.
Rhex recognised it.
And for the first time that day, she felt fear.
The symbol meant:
FORBIDDEN.
No coordinates.
No species classification.
No historical record.
Only fragmented warnings copied from sources far older than modern Elyndra.
Do not approach.
Do not establish contact.
Do not enter.
No explanation followed.
Rhex stared at the ancient designation.
“Someone knew this place existed.”
“Who?”
She shook her head.
“I don't know.”
Then the sensors detected a planet.
The World Below
At first it appeared dead.
A dark world orbiting a weak star.
No conventional civilisation signals.
No satellites.
No orbital traffic.
No transmissions.
Yet enormous energy fluctuations rose from its surface.
Rhex ordered the Aevum into silent observation.
The vessel activated its Veil System, one of the most advanced concealment technologies ever created by the Sylvani.
Light bent around the hull.
Thermal emissions disappeared.
Electromagnetic output collapsed beneath ambient space.
Spiritual signature dampeners activated.
To ordinary sensors, the Aevum effectively ceased to exist.
Rhex had entered military systems without being detected using less sophisticated concealment.
Whatever lived below would never know they were there.
At least that was what she believed.
“Magnify.”
The planetary image expanded.
Rhex frowned.
There were structures.
Gigantic structures.
Not cities.
Something else.
She ordered a lower orbit.
The Aevum descended.
And gradually the surface resolved.
No one spoke.
Bodies.
At first Rhex thought the formations were geological.
Then she recognised limbs.
Faces.
Armour.
Skeletons.
Thousands.
Then tens of thousands.
Then more.
The scale became impossible to understand.
Entire valleys had been filled with corpses.
Not of one species.
Hundreds.
Perhaps thousands.
Bodies collected from civilizations that should never have encountered one another.
Some wore primitive armour.
Others technological exoskeletons.
Some were enormous.
Others tiny.
Humanoid forms lay beside insectoid bodies.
Winged creatures beside aquatic species contained inside fluid chambers.
Beings whose biology Rhex could not begin to classify.
And these were merely those visible from orbit.
“My gods…”
The navigator whispered the words.
Rhex did not correct him.
Across the planet stood immense biological complexes.
Towers grown from black tissue.
Rivers of luminous fluid.
Caverns filled with membranes.
Structures that contracted and expanded slowly, like lungs.
This was not a civilisation.
It was an organism pretending to be one.
Or perhaps an entire world had become a laboratory.
The Rapax
Something moved below.
Then another.
And another.
Rhex magnified the image.
Creatures roamed among the bodies.
Monstrous forms.
Some winged.
Some crawling.
Some almost humanoid.
Others so anatomically wrong that looking at them created discomfort.
There were thousands.
No.
Millions.
A researcher began comparing them with recently circulated intelligence reports.
“Commander…”
“I know.”
A creature displayed on one screen resembled descriptions coming from Drokhar.
Another matched footage from Ghorvann.
The creatures various worlds had begun calling:
RAPAX.
But here they were everywhere.
Drokhar had experienced an invasion.
Ghorvann had experienced an invasion.
This place looked like the source of the nightmare.
Rhex stared down at the planet.
“So that's where they go.”
“What?”
“The bodies.”
She pointed.
“Those aren't local dead.”
The realization spread through the bridge.
Every corpse stolen during attacks across distant Universes...
might have been brought here.
The Laboratories
The Aevum descended further.
Nobody suggested leaving.
Not yet.
Fear fought against something powerful inside every explorer:
the need to understand.
They observed Rapax dragging bodies into enormous pits.
Others carried corpses into translucent structures filled with dark fluid.
Some bodies were dismantled.
Others reconstructed.
Tissue was removed.
Measured.
Combined.
Copied.
Rhex watched a mechanical arm being cut from the corpse of an unknown Futura soldier.
Minutes later, something organic nearby began growing a crude approximation of the same mechanism.
The crew stared.
“They're learning from them,” someone said.
Another researcher whispered:
“No.”
He magnified another section.
A Rapax opened its arm.
Inside was an imperfect technological structure fused directly into tissue.
“They're learning to become them.”
Rhex remembered intelligence from Ghorvann.
Stolen bodies.
Hybrid tissues.
Experiments.
Suddenly the purpose began to appear.
Technology.
Biology.
Genetics.
Combat systems.
Every body arriving here represented:
INFORMATION.
This planet was consuming the evolutionary achievements of the Cosmos.
Then Rhex saw her.
The Woman
She stood at the centre of an enormous circular platform.
At first Rhex thought the image had been corrupted.
She magnified it.
A woman.
Two arms.
Two legs.
Human proportions.
A face.
Hair.
A form almost indistinguishable from—
“Sapiens,” said the medical officer.
Rhex slowly turned towards him.
“Run comparison.”
The computer processed it.
MORPHOLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCE: SAPIENS — 98.7%.
Nobody spoke.
A Sapiens.
Here.
In this place.
Among the Rapax.
Surrounded by mountains of stolen bodies.
“How?”
No one knew.
The woman wore something that seemed simultaneously clothing, armour and living material.
It shifted subtly over her body.
Not mechanically.
Almost as though it breathed with her.
Around the platform stood thousands of Rapax.
And every one of them was facing her.
Not guarding her.
Not merely awaiting orders.
Revering her.
Rhex felt something cold move through her.
“She commands them.”
The woman lifted one hand.
The Rapax surrounding her lowered themselves.
Thousands.
Immediately.
Perfectly.
Ordo.
Absolute.
Rhex watched the scene from orbit through concealment that should have made observation impossible.
“What species is she?”
“No match.”
“Sapiens?”
“Only morphology.”
“Energy?”
The science officer tried.
Then tried again.
His expression changed.
“That can't be correct.”
Rhex looked over.
“What?”
“The instruments can't establish an upper value.”
“Meaning?”
“The energy output keeps exceeding the scale.”
“From her?”
He nodded.
Rhex moved closer.
“How much?”
“I don't know.”
The officer recalibrated.
Numbers climbed.
Failed.
Reset.
Climbed again.
Failed.
Someone whispered:
“A goddess.”
Another crew member corrected him instinctively.
“If that reading is accurate...”
He didn't finish.
Rhex did.
“No.”
Her mouth had become dry.
“Not a Goddess.”
She understood the implication of the readings.
Ordinary Gods—Architects of Universes—existed at extraordinary energetic scales.
This was something else.
Something that belonged higher in the hierarchy.
Rhex stared at the Sapiens-shaped woman standing among monsters.
“A Meta-Goddess.”
The bridge went silent.
The words were absurd.
Astrals.
Meta-Gods.
Beings of The Source.
They were not supposed to stand upon forgotten planets directing armies of abominations.
And yet the instruments insisted that whatever they were watching possessed power approaching a category no mortal crew should ever encounter.
Rhex whispered:
“What are you?”
The woman turned her head.
Rhex stopped breathing.
Slowly—
impossibly—
the woman's face turned upward.
Towards the sky.
Towards orbit.
Towards them.
Rhex felt every hair on her body rise.
“She's looking at us.”
The navigator laughed nervously.
“Impossible.”
Nobody else laughed.
The woman's gaze remained fixed.
Directly upon the Aevum.
Rhex turned towards tactical.
“Check Veil System.”
“Perfect.”
“Spiritual dampening?”
“Perfect.”
“Energy leakage?”
“Zero.”
“She cannot detect us.”
Down on the planet...
the woman smiled.
“Get us out.”
Rhex did not shout.
That made the command more frightening.
“Maximum withdrawal.”
The engines activated.
The Aevum accelerated away from the planet.
Nothing followed.
Rhex watched the woman become smaller on the display.
One thousand kilometres.
Two.
Five.
The crew began breathing again.
Then every system aboard the Aevum died.
No alarms.
No explosion.
Everything simply...
stopped.
The ship drifted.
Emergency illumination appeared seconds later.
“What happened?”
“No damage.”
“Reactors?”
“Functional.”
“Then restore systems.”
“They won't respond.”
Rhex looked back towards the planet.
The woman was gone.
A voice spoke behind her.
“Looking for me?”
Nobody moved.
Rhex turned.
She stood in the centre of the bridge.
The woman.
No teleportation flash.
No opening door.
No detectable transition.
One instant empty space.
The next—
her.
Up close, the resemblance to a Sapiens was even more disturbing.
Beautiful.
Calm.
Almost serene.
There was nothing monstrous about her appearance.
Only her eyes.
Something ancient lived behind them.
Not age measured in years.
Depth.
As though those eyes had watched stars ignite and die without ever needing to blink.
The crew raised weapons.
The woman looked around.
“So far from home.”
Rhex drew her blade.
“Who are you?”
The woman ignored the question.
She looked at the Sylvani instruments.
Touched one console.
Information immediately began flowing across it despite the ship's systems supposedly being offline.
“A clever species.”
Rhex stepped forward.
“Get off my ship.”
The woman smiled.
“Your ship?”
She looked around again.
Then back at Rhex.
“How adorable.”
Rhex attacked first.
Not from anger.
From calculation.
Her blade crossed the distance between them in less than a second.
The woman caught it between two fingers.
No energy shield.
No armour.
Two fingers.
Rhex twisted.
Nothing.
It felt as though the blade had been embedded inside a planet.
The woman examined it.
“Beautiful.”
She flicked her fingers.
Rhex flew across the bridge.
Her body struck a wall hard enough to crack armour.
“COMMANDER!”
The crew opened fire.
Energy bolts.
Projectiles.
Arcane discharges.
Twenty-two warriors and explorers attacked simultaneously.
The woman did not move.
Every projectile stopped.
Suspended in the air.
Thousands of fragments of lethal energy hanging motionless around her.
She looked at them.
Curious.
Then closed her hand.
Everything disappeared.
Not deflected.
Not absorbed visibly.
Gone.
Rhex pushed herself upright.
“Evacuate!”
The woman laughed softly.
“Where?”
The walls of the Aevum vanished.
The crew suddenly stood upon the planetary platform.
No transition.
No sensation of movement.
One instant spacecraft.
The next—
the forbidden world.
The smell hit them first.
Blood.
Chemical decay.
Burnt flesh.
Something sweet and rotten.
Around them stretched the true nightmare they had observed from above.
Mountains of bodies.
Rapax.
Thousands of them.
Watching.
Rhex looked upward.
The Aevum remained in orbit.
The woman had removed twenty-three people from a concealed spacecraft thousands of kilometres above the planet...
without touching it.
A crew member whispered:
“Oh gods.”
The woman stood before them.
“Your gods are very far away.”
The Sylvani formed a defensive circle.
That was Ordo.
They knew they could not win.
They fought anyway.
Rhex raised her sword.
“Together.”
Twenty-three voices answered.
“For Elyndra.”
The first Ranger charged.
The woman moved one finger.
He disappeared.
Not exploded.
Disappeared.
His body reappeared thirty metres away and struck the ground broken.
Two Sylvani fired.
Their weapons twisted inside their hands as though softened by heat.
Another launched an arcane field.
The woman walked through it.
Rhex attacked from behind.
Her blade touched the woman's neck.
For one glorious fraction of a second, Rhex believed—
Then the woman turned.
She had allowed it.
The blade had not cut her skin.
She looked directly into Rhex's eyes.
“You are perceptive.”
Rhex struck again.
The woman seized her wrist.
Pain exploded through Rhex's arm.
Bone fractured.
Rhex screamed.
“That's why you found us.”
The woman's voice remained almost gentle.
“And why you were foolish enough to keep looking.”
She released her.
The massacre lasted less than three minutes.
The Sylvani fought with everything they had.
Rangers moved between Rapax with impossible precision.
Energy weapons carved through monsters.
Blades severed limbs.
Several Rapax died.
None of it mattered.
The woman barely participated.
She watched.
Studied.
Occasionally intervened when someone threatened to escape.
One by one, Rhex's crew fell.
Talen.
Serai.
Oryn.
Kaelis.
Veyn.
Names.
Friends.
People who had laughed aboard the Aevum only hours earlier.
Now bodies.
And every time one fell, Rapax immediately approached.
Not to eat them.
To collect them.
Rhex understood.
“No!”
She attacked a Rapax dragging Serai away.
Killed it.
Another replaced it.
She killed that one too.
Then something struck her from behind.
Rhex fell.
Her vision blurred.
Across the platform she saw the woman's feet approaching.
Slowly.
Unhurried.
Rhex tried to rise.
Her broken arm refused.
She reached for her sidearm.
The woman stepped upon it.
Rhex looked up.
“What... are you doing with the bodies?”
For the first time, the woman's expression changed.
Interest.
“You travelled through the CryptoWeb.”
Rhex froze.
“You learned to cross between Universes.”
The woman crouched beside her.
“That makes your species very valuable.”
Rhex understood the horror immediately.
“You want our ships.”
“No.”
The woman smiled.
“We want to understand how you made them.”
Rhex looked towards the Rapax carrying her friends.
“And our bodies?”
The smile remained.
“Those too.”
Rhex spat blood at her.
It landed upon the woman's cheek.
Every Rapax nearby reacted violently.
The woman raised one hand.
They stopped instantly.
She wiped the blood away with one finger.
Looked at it.
Then laughed.
“I like you.”
Rhex's hand moved towards a hidden blade.
The woman caught her wrist without looking.
“Good.”
She leaned closer.
“Keep fighting.”
Rhex stared back at her.
“Why?”
The woman's smile disappeared.
And for one terrible moment Rhex glimpsed something behind the Sapiens face.
Not physically.
Something spiritual.
Vast.
Dark.
Hungry.
“Because struggle makes the spirit brighter.”
Rhex remembered the reports from Drokhar.
The draining.
The Hollowing.
Energy.
Suddenly she understood why some victims might be more valuable than others.
The woman stood.
Rhex whispered:
“Who are you?”
The figure looked down at her.
For a moment Rhex thought she might answer.
Instead she said:
“Not yet.”
Something pierced Rhex's abdomen.
A Rapax tail.
Pain.
Cold.
She collapsed.
Her hand remained wrapped around the hilt of her broken sword.
Around her, the bodies of the Aevum's crew were being collected.
Bagged.
Wrapped.
Catalogued.
No funerals.
No return to Elyndra.
Raw material.
Rhex's vision dimmed.
The woman walked away.
Rapax bowed as she passed.
Rhex forced one final breath.
She looked towards the impossible Sapiens-shaped being.
And saw her stop.
The woman turned slightly.
As though hearing Rhex's last thought.
Then smiled.
Darkness took her.
Hours later, the Aevum still floated silently in orbit.
Perfectly intact.
Empty.
Its navigation systems contained every secret the Sylvani had developed for traversing the CryptoWeb.
Down below, twenty-three new bodies entered the laboratories.
New biology.
New knowledge.
New technology.
New possibilities.
And around the planet, stolen dead continued arriving from worlds whose inhabitants still believed their tragedies were unrelated.
Minas.
Orkyos.
Sapiens.
Species with no names in any common language.
Hundreds of Universes represented in mountains of flesh.
The Rapax were multiplying.
The spiritual entities were growing stronger.
Their experiments were accelerating.
And at the centre of it all stood a woman who looked inexplicably like a Sapiens.
A being whose power suggested something far beyond a God.
Perhaps even a Meta-Goddess.
She watched the Sylvani ship suspended above her world.
Then she raised one hand.
A black opening formed before the Aevum.
A wound in the CryptoWeb.
The ship was pulled inside.
Not destroyed.
Taken.
Because nothing useful was wasted here.
Neither machines.
Nor knowledge.
Nor souls.
Nor bodies.
In Elyndra, the Aevum never returned.
No distress signal arrived.
No wreckage was found.
No final transmission survived.
Twenty-three Sylvani simply vanished from the Cosmos.
Among them:
RHEX.
And so nobody learned what they had discovered.
Nobody learned where the stolen bodies were going.
Nobody learned that the Rapax were being created rather than born.
Nobody learned that something inside the Forbidden Universe was studying every species it could reach.
And nobody learned about the woman.
Not yet.
Far away, however, the first disappearances were becoming patterns.
On Drokhar, Ragnak was beginning to understand that invisible entities were feeding upon the Minas.
On Ghorvann, Nerok had discovered that the stolen dead were being used to learn how bodies worked.
And in a forbidden Universe beyond every recognised route...
Rhex discovered the truth.
Too late.
The enemy was not merely trying to enter the Cosmos.
It was building itself from the Cosmos.
One species at a time.
One technology at a time.
One stolen body at a time.
And whatever that Sapiens-shaped woman truly was...
even the Sumaya seemed to obey her.