There was no sound when consciousness returned for him. The only thing he could feel was the crushing sense of being dragged up through some dense darkness before colour folded in on itself. Memory and present blurred into a slurry that tasted faintly metallic. His thoughts were thick as Klingon bloodwine.

Somewhere, very far away, a small, familiar mechanical wail pulsed like a heartbeat, too slow to be comforting.

Then the whisper threaded through the dark.

Not words so much as pressure, a cold brush across the inside of his head.

Surrender to the Deep Light.

Corbin’s eyes opened to the wrong room. It wasn’t what he was expecting. It wasn’t the bridge. Where was he?

At first, relief washed over him as he realised where he was. The secure certainty of a familiar desk, the habitual sight of his combadge laid out on a stack of reports. He’d expected the Atlas’s ready room. He’d been expecting the new lines, the clean modern curves of an Andromeda-class ship. Instead, he saw the older curve of a Galaxy-class desk, the kind he’d learned to respect during long watches aboard the Columbia. He realised with a small jolt of nausea that he was not looking at the Atlas at all; he was looking at his old ready room.

The carpet under his boots, the pattern of muted blues and teals worn into soft threads, was wrong. The wood panelling behind the desk was thicker, burnished by decades of hands. The photo frame on the far shelf held a younger version of himself and his family on the Columbia. Corbin blinked hard.

His body rose on reflex. He had never wanted to be sentimental about command posts, but the Columbia had been formative; its creak was woven into him. Here, in the wrongness of the room, the familiar became unnatural to him. As he moved, the desk seemed to breathe under his fingertips; the surface rippled finely as if the wood had skin.

Something thrummed under his boots. Not the warp vibrations he knew from engines but a more subterranean pulse, as though the ship itself were standing on a great, sleeping throat.

Deep Light.

The whisper was closer now. It was almost like an echo behind his ears. Corbin’s training told him to remain calm and to rely on the evidence before him. He forced his eyes to inventory the room: tricorder, unused padd, and his old academy certificate hanging on the wall. He reached for the combadge at his breast and felt only his palm against his uniform.

The ready-room door sighed open. He should have felt alarmed when Prime Curator I’Tareen stepped in, but instead, he sensed a strange, dreamlike feeling in which everything made sense in a symbolic way, rather than based on what is real or proven. None of this made sense, but on some level it did to him. Corbin couldn’t shake that feeling off.

The Prime Curator, the Ivalan leader from the diplomatic reception earlier, was here, but her eyes were wrapped in translucent cloth, bandages folded and tucked like ritual. Her robe was present, but the colours bled into the room, as if the fabrics had been washed repeatedly through fog.

“Captain,” I’Tareen said, and the sound of her voice arrived with too many harmonics. “Do not look at me.”

There was a carefully wrong formality in the words, a practised ritual tempo. She stood with a head tilt that suggested she was attuned to a frequency he could not hear or see.

“They are calling,” she said in her melody-like tone. “The echo you have been hearing. The one that fed through the I’Shathren’s logs like a thread.” Her hand rose and tapped a finger twice against her temple. “It reaches outward from a place that sleeps beneath the ground. You were there. You know what happened.”

Corbin’s mouth was dry. He wanted to say something, almost protest that he had no idea what she was going on about. He had not walked the decks of the I’Shathren. He had not personally seen the devastation beyond the tricorder logs taken by Nelson and the rest of the away team alongside the shaky salvage ship logs they had retrieved. Yet within this place, right here, right now, the salvaged information felt like something else to him. They were almost like impressions that belonged to him, as if he had been there and had experienced everything with his own eyes, just as Nelson had described it to him.

However, it was more than just that.

It was as if he could feel the recorded panic from the logs of Captain I’Virella like an old wound. As if he was standing next to her as she spoke about what was happening to her crew and ship. The panic in her voice. The tremors and the terror felt real.

Nevertheless, none of it made sense. It was all mixed up. It was a blur.

A sound lifted. It was high, fragile, then close: an infant’s cry.

Warmth flooded the ready room, olive light replacing the archive dim. The desk melted away. He was in a hospital suite on Mellstoxx III. He knew this place all too well. It felt safe, secure.

Arleena’s soft hand lay on the sheet covering her and most of her bio bed. She’d given birth to their son and was resting. Avexan, hours old and perfect in the ridiculous way newborns are, lay swaddled in a blanket printed with a star pattern. Corbin knew the exact pitch of his son’s tiny cry, how it had tugged something protective in him. He remembered, vividly, the first time the baby’s fingers had clenched around his own.

“He’s perfect, Imzadi,” He whispered to his wife, before looking back at the baby in her arms.
However, Avexan’s face seemed to flicker. The newborn’s eyes were there, then not. Light pooled at the corners as if someone had cut away the pupils like thread. Arleena’s smile in the dream blurred to a smear, then became a stillness he didn’t recognise at first.

The room cooled.

“Not here,” he said aloud. His voice was thin in the unknown that was now forming around him.
Behind him, reflected in the curved glass of the large bay window, something moved that was not a person. It was a folding of negative space, a dim ripple like the heat-sheen above a kiln. It took the shape of a column, tall, and it felt wrong. It was too tall for any architecture he’d studied or recognised. The surface was not stone or metal but a darkness that drank at the surrounding light. It was stretching everything around him. Blurring. Clouding. Confusing.

Corbin’s throat constricted. He tried to step forward, but the floor felt like glass, and he slid on invisible ice. His son’s cry pitched into a layered, harmonised sound with other voices undertoned with the baby’s screams, until he could not tell which was real and which was not.

“This is not your world to hold,” said the voice.

No, it was a sensation that pressed at his mind. Not malice so much as weight, the gravity of some creature speaking in a language he had not heard before.

The maternity room fractured like a broken holonovel. The sterile white bled out into smoke and ash.

Corbin found himself in a place he had never been before. He stood at the edge of a shattered settlement. Quickly gazing around, Corbin couldn’t piece together where he was. He closed his eyes for a moment to concentrate. It was challenging to focus.

Then he remembered the images he had seen. This was Ivalis Two. The images were from the sensor scans that they had taken of the planet as they entered the Ivalis system. However, something was happening, and for some reason, Corbin knew what was happening. How could he though? He had not been there.

I’Tareen had spoken to him and the others about the raid earlier. A desperate policing action, the Doctrine’s converts, ruined plazas. The capture of key doctrine leaders. Those who pushed their beliefs and ways onto others had been stopped before tragedy had hit those who were too vulnerable and easily swayed to follow them.

But he had not been there in person. Yet the rubble lay under his boots as though he had flown in from orbit.

Figures moved through the smoke. Hooded figures bound in ritual with garlands of cloth hanging like banners. They moved with a certainty and a cadence that made his gut cold. The chant became audible, and the words were not foreign. He recognised the rhythm because it had threaded through the salvage logs, through the whispered accounts from those who had pulled bodies from the I’Shathren.

Surrender to the Deep Light.

The phrase was everywhere. It found him like a blade finding its way through fabric into flesh.
He clapped his hands over his ears and closed his eyes tightly, but the sound had already gone past the threshold of his ear and lodged in his skull. He staggered, reached for anything solid, and the ground melted beneath him like ink, spilling into a vast, dim chamber that was none of the places he’d known. The walls were angular in ways he could not properly work out, veined with soft veins of blue-white that pulsed slowly, in time with the whisper.

Corbin was on the bridge again.

He was certain this was the bridge that belonged to the Atlas, though it felt like another bridge. LCARS consoles lined the walls, but the glyphs that ran across them were not Federation standard. They were geometric and repeating, folding onto themselves like shaped script. A view opened to Ivalis II on the main viewer, but the planet’s outlines flickered, overlaid with the same script patterns.

From the centre of the screen, a shape rose: not a ship, not a living thing he could categorise. It was abstract. It was an arrangement of negative space and light. When he squinted, it suggested height. It resisted fixation; each time he tried to hold it, the edges blurred. It produced a sensation that was not sight at all but a drag on his mind, a sensation of being watched by a thought that predated any known language.

Corbin’s chest tightened.

He had felt similar pressure.

Now it was nearer, as if whatever dreamed behind the stone had detected the scraping of his mind and tilted its dream to listen.

He steadied himself on the armrest and tried to think with the clear, stern logic that had kept him alive through his time as captain.

The salvaged logs.

The freighters that had surrounded the Atlas.

The chant on their open broadcast.

The phrase that had lodged itself in his memory.

Instead, everything around him became more blurred. All he could sense was a low murmur. It was soft and terrible.

We did not mean to be found.

The sentence was not spoken so much as pressed into him, and for a sliver of time, the dread behind it softened into something like regret. Then the sensation swelled, prickled along his skin, and the whisper surged into a roar.

SURRENDER TO THE DEEP LIGHT.

His knees gave. He hit the deck of whatever bridge this was, and the lights sheared like sharp glass. The scrape of his body against the flooring echoed as if through a cavern.

Darkness closed in, and Corbin closed his eyes.

Then, beneath the dark, a new voice. It was nearer now, intimate, like an animal at the edge of hearing, brushed the inside of his skull.

The spire.

He jolted upright, lungs burning, sweat peeling from his skin, though there was no actual heat.

When Corbin opened his eyes, he was back in his ready room.

It was still the ready room, sort of.

The carpet was still the carpet, sort of.

Corbin then realised what was happening. His environment was one on top of the other. The Columbia’s ready room was overlaying the ready room from the Atlas. His heart was like a bass drum. He tasted iron on his tongue.
Drip by small drip, the phrase, the hum, the chant, whatever was threatening him was real on some level. Was it connected to what was threatening the Ivalans? He could not tell, but Corbin knew for sure that it was not only ideological but something more. Something older was sweeping through his mind and the minds of the Ivalans. It was leaking images and hunger into a civilisation that had never seen such things for centuries, possibly millennia.

Corbin bowed his head once, as if in prayer or as if to clear the fog. The memory of Avexan’s first weight in his arms steadied him where everything else had not.

He pressed his fingertips to his forehead. He did not yet know what the spire was, how to find it, or what it meant to surrender to the deep light. But he knew this, like instinct. Whatever it was that was calling out to him, he had a strong sense of it lying beneath Ivalis Two. The fact that the civilian freighters had not resisted I’Tareen’s offer of leaving the planet defenceless now made sense. Now the connection with the planet had reached out to him, and it had found him.

It had told him to visit.

A whisper tickled his ear.

“The Deep Light… it calls…”

Corbin spun. No one was there. Nothing moved but the shadows, which flickered across shattered crystal and scorched soil. His instincts screamed at him to run, yet every step forward dragged him deeper into the darkness.

The voices multiplied, layering upon one another, each one an echo of terror and devotion.

“You cannot resist…”

“You must see…”

“It knows you…”

Corbin’s hand went to his head. He tried to call out to his crew, to anyone, to ground himself in some sense of reality.

“Stop! I’m here!” He shouted.

But the voices did not answer him.

They were not alive, yet they pressed against his consciousness as if aware of every thought, every hesitation. The shadows elongated, bending as if to reach him, folding everything inward.

All of a sudden, he was somewhere else. Each fragment of his previous memory of his son’s birth appeared all of a sudden. From the quiet joy of Avexan’s first cries, Arleena’s smile, and the sterile stillness of the hospital room. It was pulled and distorted, warped into the whispers’ rhythm.

And then he was somewhere else.

He was aboard the Columbia. The helm glowed faintly in emergency red alert, consoles flickering with warnings he did not recognise. Corbin’s pulse quickened as the bridge tilted beneath him, the lights flickering with an unnatural rhythm.

The image on the main viewscreen was barely visible. What he could interpret was a swirling mass of black and violet, coiling and writhing like a living storm, radiated with the same pulse that had haunted him through every distorted memory.

Corbin’s hand clenched the edge of the helm’s console.

The beat returned. Stronger. Singular. Not the heartbeat of a starship, not the pulse of his own body, but something else. Something inescapable. He felt it in his teeth, his spine, the very marrow of his bones. The voices swelled again, now with perfect harmony, each syllable hammering into him.

“Surrender… see… obey…”

He covered his ears, knelt, felt the floor tilt beneath him, yet the sound persisted. The anomaly on the viewscreen erupted in blinding light, and he screamed. It was not because of fear, but because the voices were sharing something more with him. It was knowledge, knowledge that was ancient and incomprehensible. They were clawing at his mind. His memories collided. From Avexan’s newborn cry, Arleena’s face, the images of Ivalis II, Columbia’s bridge and Atlas’ bridge. All of them overlaid in harmony.

Then he washed over with a strange sense of calmness.

Corbin was floating, or perhaps he suspended above a structure so vast he could not take it in. Horizontal towers stretched infinitely, veins of faint, glowing light weaving patterns impossible yet instinctively recognisable.

The structure pulsed. Every beat appeared within his mind. He knew, even without understanding, that this was the origin of the influence, the source of the whispers, the origin of the Deep Light.

The beat slowed, then quickened.

It resonated with every memory, every emotion, twisting them until he could not distinguish what was real from what had been conjured. And then, within that impossible shape, he saw something. That something that was not a person, not a machine, but a presence. It did not move, yet it observed. Corbin did not dare focus, did not dare think, and yet he knew it could perceive him entirely.

Corbin’s mind whirled with intensity. The fragments of his life, the joy of fatherhood, the bond with his crew, the weight of command, the Atlas under red alert. All were threads, and he was trapped within the tapestry.

A whisper came, soft as a dying star.

“See. Surrender.”

Then a scream pierced its way through his mind.

The jaws of an unknown form lurch forward towards him at an incredible speed.
Corbin couldn’t move as he was engulfed by it all.