Inora Prime
The largest rocky planet in the known universe — not by a small margin, but by a margin that made any second place irrelevant for comparison. The most ancient cradle of carbon-based life, with records that preceded any other existing record by enough time that the difference wasn't historical, but geological. A solar system composed of just one massive planet and its star, as though the universe had decided that place deserved to exist in deliberate isolation — not as punishment, but as curation.
And at the heart of that planet, beneath the great white dome that rose like a luminous scar on the dark surface, the metallic structures of the I.C.O.P floated at safe distances from one another — each one housing representatives of the races that had decided, millennia ago, that administrating the universe was more efficient than letting nature act.
The Intergalactic Confederation of Order and Punishment. The pretty name had nothing to do with representation or union — it was the kind of name built to communicate legitimacy before demonstrating it. It was there that expansions were approved, invasions authorized, and exterminations voted on with the coldness of someone signing an administrative document. The most powerful place that existed. The political center of gravity of an entire universe.
And in that moment, the center was in panic.
✦ ✦ ✦
"SHUT UP. ALL OF YOU."
The voice that cut through the dome like thunder wasn't one that was usually heard.
In truth, hearing the voice of Zogtha Darkblood was as rare as knowing he was capable of speech. The majority of creatures that had ever had the privilege — or the misfortune — of being in the presence of the leader of the Stone Giants had never heard him utter a single word. Zogtha delegated. Always delegated. Most of the time, the one who sat in the I.C.O.P chair in his name was Garnet, his son — whose more placid and obtuse temperament made him suitable for the politics his father considered too small to deserve his presence. The fact that Zogtha was there personally, seated in the chair his son had occupied for many years, already said more than any speech he could give.
Whatever was happening was too large for Garnet.
In truth, the problem wasn't new. Zogtha had seen it before — not exactly this, but the pattern. The smell. The way things organized themselves before they collapsed. In millennia of existence, with a body made of silicon and not of carbon and a patience as vast as the rock from which he was composed, he had learned to recognize the signs: when a race too powerful appeared too quickly, when the balance cracked from within before breaking from without, when the chaotic voices like these began to raise the volume even higher. Every time these conditions had aligned in the past, the result was the same.
Tragedy.
And things were heading to that place again — dangerous and familiar, like a path he had walked too many times to pretend he didn't know where it ended.
Something that was supposed to be rare and difficult had finally happened. And with it, the pressure for something to be done.
The Dome of Inora Prime was the only place capable of containing that pressure — and even it seemed to be yielding. The only place in the universe where the ten most powerful races gathered. It wasn't a place of peace — it had never been. It was a place of balance, which is a completely different thing. The walls were made of a material no race claimed to have created — dark, smooth, cold to the touch, absorbing sound in a way that made each word seem heavier than it should. The White Dome rose too high to be practical, vanishing into a dark that seemed intentional, as though the place itself wanted to remind everyone they were small in there.
In that moment, the reminder was working.
In that moment, the balance was breaking.
Voices overlapped. Accusations crossed the table in languages most of those present didn't even recognize. Representatives of races that normally barely looked at each other were now shouting in the same direction, united by the only thing that always unites enemies: the fear of something greater.
Zogtha struck his hand on the great metallic platform on which he floated.
It cracked.
The silence that followed wasn't one of respect. It was the instinctive silence of creatures that, however powerful they were, had just been reminded they were in the same place as the most ancient and, until the present moment, strongest thing that existed in the Oasis.
"Zogtha, if you'll permit me to speak." The voice that cut through the silence was liquid — not like water running, but like something denser, heavier. "I would like to command a crusade to Lagherta's planet."
Zurko.
The representative of the Aquamarines rose in his place — and "rose" was an understatement for what happened, because Zurko didn't stand like other creatures. He expanded. The body changed shape, gaining presence, occupying more space than physics should allow. His father should have been there — it was the father who sat in that chair, who had voice and vote, who carried the weight of the name. But the father hadn't come. And the son spoke with the urgency of someone who knows that each second of debate was a second wasted.
"We need to destroy them. You know what happens when a race too powerful and without scruples assumes any relevant role in the Oasis."
Zogtha knew.
Knew better than any creature in that hall. Being composed of silicon, he lived longer than all the races present combined. He had seen shifts in power. Many. Most were tranquil — the natural rise of a race that accumulates strength over generations, the soft fall of another that loses territory or influence, the slow and predictable dance of a ranking that reorganized itself every century or two. Zogtha's own race had already passed through the same colleague who now called for war. The Stone Giants had been the strongest, then weren't, then were again. The cycle repeated. That was how it worked.
But what was happening now wasn't a cycle.
It was a rupture.
"Zurko." Zogtha's voice came out with the weight of someone who measures each syllable the way one measures a crack in a dam. "Your father was the one who should be here. I am respecting your words only out of respect for him." The giant's eyes — two luminous slits in a face that looked more like a sculpted mountain — descended upon the Aquamarine with the slowness of someone who needs no hurry to crush. "But do not take me for an idiot." The sentence came heavier than the ones before — as though each word had been chosen among a thousand, and the other nine hundred and ninety-nine discarded for being too gentle. "A long time ago — a time in which you did not yet exist — we agreed that we would never take the side of eliminating a race because of a shift in power. We have lived through this. And we learned, with blood that dried before your species was born, that it never brought anything good." The stone hand settled on the cracked platform — and the crack grew another centimeter. "What I seek is understanding and options. Not war and death."
The Aquamarines had a simple understanding of the problems they faced: talk or destroy. Things weren't gray. There were no middle grounds, no prolonged negotiations, no backroom deals. It was yes or no. Peace or war.
Zogtha had lived too long to accept that simplicity. But not long enough to agree with it — because he knew.
Knew with the certainty of someone who had already seen entire civilizations born and die — that authoritarianism, censorship, and war always came from good intentions. Always. Nobody starts a crusade thinking they're wrong. The corruption happens slowly, with time and with the malice that disguises itself as necessity. A good idea applied in haste was merely an atrocity with nice packaging.
But however much his experience screamed caution, Zogtha also knew that something was fundamentally wrong.
The Oasis had always been a platform that submitted all races to a hostile and complex world, but that allowed interaction and commerce. For the great giant, the Oasis had always been a place that disguised a cruel and terrifying universe as something greater — something he himself had taken a few good thousand years to understand. The Oasis wasn't about winning. It wasn't about being the most powerful. It was about interacting. About uniting in pursuit of something that no race, alone, however strong, could face.
Inora Prime was born from that. The relationship that the ten strongest races maintained among themselves, however fragile, was born from that. It wasn't easy — it never was. But it had always been plausible.
Until now.
"Honestly, Zogtha." A new voice cut through the hall — and this time the giant felt something he rarely felt. Surprise. "I have to agree with Zurko."
The leader of the Travellers.
The Travellers never took sides. It was the unwritten rule that defined their existence — impartial by nature, traders by vocation, the race that did business with everyone and made enemies of none. They artificially maintained the fifth position in the ranking not through brute force, but by being too indispensable to be attacked. If the Travellers took a side, something had changed irreversibly.
"You and I know that what the Oasis did makes no sense at all." The Travellers' leader spoke with the robotic and calculated voice of someone who weighs each word in gold before spending it. "Taking no action is accepting that our business partner — and one of the high leaders of our summit — is going to be exterminated."
Lagherta.
The Infernals.
The third strongest race of the Oasis — and their chair was empty. Lagherta and her entourage hadn't come to the meeting, and everyone there knew the reason without anyone needing to say it. At that exact moment, the Infernals were probably locked in their own halls, trying to calculate how they would survive what was coming.
Because the Infernals shared the same solar system as the Vriseus.
The Oasis was the only thing that allowed the Infernals to accumulate enough strength to resist. For millennia, the balance held: the Vriseus were forbidden from entering, the Infernals grew within the system, and the coexistence — if it could be called that — functioned by the simple fact that one of the sides had enough strength to prevent the other from stepping on its territory.
That advantage no longer existed.
And war was imminent.
Zogtha looked at the platforms around his. Representatives of races that together controlled more power than anything the known universe had ever produced — and in each face, in each posture, in each silence between the words, he saw the same thing.
Fear.
All the problems concentrated on a single truth: the Vriseus didn't seem to want to talk. They hadn't sent emissaries. They hadn't responded to proposals. They hadn't given signs that diplomacy was a concept that existed in their language. In truth, they themselves were so strange, so fundamentally different from everything Inora Prime had ever catalogued in millennia of existence, that it was difficult to explain what they really wanted. If they wanted anything.
Maybe they only wanted what predators want.
And if there was one thing that made the great Stone Giant tremble — every fiber of silicon, every layer of rock accumulated over eras — it was that next to what a Vriseu could do, even he, the most powerful, the most ancient, the most capable… didn't know how to react.
He had already seen the records.
Had already watched, in the coldness of data that doesn't lie, what that race did to its opponents. It wasn't fighting. It wasn't conquest. It wasn't anything that could be described with the words civilized creatures used to define conflict. Even the Burmans, in their barbarity, had clear principles and a predictable nature — you knew what to expect, knew what moved them, knew where cruelty ended and logic began.
This was different.
It was feeding.
And what they ate wasn't just flesh.
"Call the Oracle."
The name fell upon the enormous Dome like a stone falling into a bottomless lake.
All the races present stiffened. There were no protests. No objections. Only the heavy silence of creatures who knew what that name meant — and who knew that every time the Oracle was called, something very bad was about to happen. Calling her was almost a taboo. It was admitting the problem was beyond what Inora Prime could solve with power, with politics, with alliances.
It was admitting they were afraid.
But in that moment, where everyone saw the enemy and felt its weight compressing the air of the hall like a gravity that shouldn't exist — perhaps hearing something terrible wasn't worse than facing that without knowing what it was.
✦ ✦ ✦
Earth
My eyes couldn't leave the screen.
In truth, even when the car stopped in front of my house, neither of us moved. Magnus didn't call out to me. I didn't open the door. The engine continued running, the air conditioning humming low, and the screen hanging from the ceiling continued showing what neither of us could stop watching.
Because what was happening on that screen was too surreal to seem real.
"What is this race?"
My mouth opened on its own. The words came out before I decided I wanted to make them — as though my body were trying to process through speech what the eyes couldn't process alone.
The fight had begun unpretentiously.
On the Burman side, the field was packed. Hundreds of soldiers lined up in formation — the kind of army that made entire kingdoms surrender before the first blow. Jurassic mounts snorting in the air. Feline commanders in heavy armor positioned on the flanks, spears and shields raised with the discipline of a race that never needed to doubt itself.
On the other side, the girl.
Alone.
Standing in the center of the field with the tranquility of someone waiting for a bus.
The Burman who advanced first was enormous — the kind of elite soldier any other race would treat as maximum threat. He came with everything. Fast. Lethal. The blow descended toward that small figure with enough force to crack the ground.
The girl didn't move.
The blow connected.
And that was when I saw, for the first time, what a Vriseu really was.
Her body absorbed the impact as if it didn't exist. She didn't dodge. She didn't defend. She didn't retreat a single centimeter. The Burman's weapon touched the surface of that small body and simply… stopped. As though it had struck something that didn't belong to the same scale of existence. As though physics had looked at the impact, decided it was irrelevant, and moved on.
The Burman was still trying to understand when she moved.
I didn't see what happened.
Nobody saw.
In one instant, the Burman was standing. In the next, he was on the ground. But not dead. Not yet. He was dismantled — and I use that word with all the nausea it carries — like a thing someone opened to see what was inside. The arms in positions arms shouldn't be in. The legs bent at angles anatomy didn't allow. The chest open.
And the girl was on top of him.
Eating.
Not the way a predator eats — with haste, with hunger, with the urgency of survival. She ate slowly. With care. With a meticulous attention that was infinitely worse than any brute violence I had ever seen in the Oasis. The small hands — a child's hands, hands that should hold toys — separated tissue from bone with the precision of a surgeon and the indifference of someone peeling a fruit.
The Burman was still alive.
I saw his eyes. Open. Conscious. Understanding. He didn't scream — maybe he couldn't, maybe the scream got stuck somewhere between the panic and the impossibility of accepting what was happening to his own body. He just looked upward, at the face of that girl who had the appearance of a lion cub, and there was no rage, no hatred — only the absolute incomprehension of someone being eaten alive by something he didn't know existed.
And then she reached the head.
My stomach turned.
The girl opened the Burman's skull with her hands — with her hands — and what she did next was the most disturbing thing I had ever seen in any world, real or otherwise. She placed her mouth over the exposed brain and sucked. Slowly. Like someone drinking from a chalice. The Burman's body shuddered one last time — and then stopped.
And the girl changed.
The transformation was immediate. The skin reconfigured. The features redistributed. The body reorganized as though someone had taken the form of that child and filled it with new information — the information of the Burman she had just consumed. In seconds, the feline features accentuated. The body grew larger. The posture changed. And when she stood up, she no longer looked like a lion cub.
She looked like a Burman.
Covered in red.
With the eyes of something that was neither Burman nor child nor anything I could classify.
And around her, the entire army watched. Nobody advanced. Nobody retreated. Hundreds of soldiers trained for war — built without soul, without desire, without anything inside that resembled free will — and even so, before that scene, they stood frozen like statues. Maybe trying to process what they had just seen. And, with all certainty, failing.
She advanced toward the second.
And toward the third.
And after.
Massacre.
"Bizarre, right…" Magnus's voice came out low — and I noticed, by the tone, that he wasn't commenting. He was holding himself together. "How can they have an inherent racial power so strong…"
The second Burman lasted less than the first. The third, less still. With each body consumed, the girl changed more — accumulating mass, accumulating form, accumulating something that went beyond physical strength. She wasn't only getting stronger. She was becoming more of them.
"This wasn't the only Vriseu who participated in the event," Magnus continued, his voice now with a thin tremor he probably thought I didn't notice. "But all who had the opportunity to grow strong — all who didn't face enemies from the cycle of the ten strongest right at the start — managed to reach the level of becoming this in just a few fights." He breathed deep. "I've never seen this."
I understood his doubt.
Since humans entered the Oasis, things had never been turbulent. The ranking of the ten strongest had always been static — when there was a change, it was one position rising or another falling, the kind of adjustment that took decades and barely altered the balance. The ten were always the ten. It was a constant. One of the few certainties that existed in a world that made a point of destroying certainties.
Now, a race nobody knew arrived and, in an absurdly short period, made the eighth strongest race of the Oasis look like a rag doll.
"When they fought among themselves…" I asked without taking my eyes from the screen. The girl — the thing that had been a girl — now cut across the field like a red blade, and the Burmans fell around her like pieces toppled by an invisible hand. "Did they do the same thing?"
Magnus's silence before answering lasted too long to be comfortable.
"If they cannibalized each other?" He swallowed hard. His eyes jumped from the monitor mounted on the steering wheel back to the road — I watched on the ceiling screen, he watched on his, the two of us trapped in the same horror from different angles. "Yes. They did. This one here, for example, did it at least three times." His hands squeezed the wheel — the knuckles white. "Honestly, I myself don't know how it's possible to have a culture like that. A race like that." His voice dropped to almost a whisper. "I wouldn't want to be born in a world where that was permitted."
My eyes didn't unfocus from the screen, but my mind flew through his words and arrived at the same conclusion.
Magnus was right.
This made no sense.
I had fought against Burmans. Had seen creatures most humans would never see. Had killed things that shouldn't be possible to kill and survived situations that shouldn't have allowed survival. I thought I had already seen the worst the Oasis had to offer.
I hadn't seen anything.
What appeared on the screen now was something that belonged to a different level of existence. The girl — who was no longer a girl, who was no longer anything that could be named — was in the center of a field covered in bodies. The Burman form she had assumed was distorted, exaggerated, as though the mold didn't fit right. The red skin shone with something that wasn't blood — it was something else, something internal, something that pulsed with a sickly luminosity. And in her hands, raised in the air like a trophy nobody asked to see, was the Burman Lord's opened skull.
She drank from it like someone drinking from a chalice.
And then the army began to disappear.
I had already seen that before — in my own war, when Dioscuros and Leda fell and their soldiers came undone into particles that rose and vanished into the air. The rule was simple and absolute: without a Lord, without a kingdom. The units didn't die — they simply ceased to exist, as though they had never been summoned.
The girl stood motionless in the center of that disappearance. Still. Watching her meal vanish before she finished eating — and on her face, for the first time, I saw something that resembled frustration. Not rage. Not disappointment. The minimal irritation of someone whose plate was taken from the table before the last bite.
"Are they all like her?" I asked. The voice came out weaker than I wanted. "I mean… this appearance. How did they first appear?"
Magnus seemed to understand the question before I finished formulating it.
"In the first fights, we thought they were Infernals." He said, his eyes on the rearview mirror as though watching something behind us that didn't exist. "Goat horns, reddish skin, even the tail, the whole structure. But when the name appeared in the system, most were confused." He pointed at the screen. "This one right here had the form of a complete Infernal — horns and everything. But after killing the first Burman and devouring it…" His finger dropped. "She became this."
This.
A thing that copied what it ate.
Not just the appearance. The form. The structure. The language. The memory. Everything that being devoured was absorbed, processed, and replicated — as though each victim wasn't just food, but information. Data. Material. And the Vriseu was the thing that transformed raw material into version.
I thought of viruses. Of something that infects a cell, reprograms it from within, and uses it to reproduce. But viruses don't have eyes. Viruses don't smile while they work. Viruses don't keep the victim alive to — and I felt my stomach contract again while processing this — extract more.
They kept their victims alive.
While eating.
Not out of cruelty. Not out of pleasure. Out of efficiency. As though the consciousness of the prey were part of the process — as though they needed the brain to be functioning to extract what was inside. The language. The history. The memories. Everything. And when they finished, when the last drop of information was sucked and the body no longer served any purpose, only then did they allow death to arrive.
How could anyone trust a creature like that?
How could anyone sit at a negotiation table with something that saw the interlocutor as raw material? How could anyone make a deal, draw a border, establish a truce with a race for whom diplomacy wasn't a concept and every living creature was merely a menu that hadn't yet been opened?
"Honestly, I myself don't feel like going back to the Oasis…" Magnus spoke, and for the first time his voice truly trembled — without disguise, without control. The human wardrobe who drove the car as though nothing frightened him was frightened. "They say they don't know how to build kingdoms yet. That's why they fight alone. They have no market. They make no deals. They make no exceptions." He swallowed hard. "Everything is food."
Everything is food.
The sentence hung in the air of the car like a smell that doesn't go away.
"I wouldn't want to be the first to meet one of them."
Neither would I.
And I had already faced Burmans.
The battlefield on the screen was silent now. The thing that had been a girl stood motionless in the center of what had been a sea of bodies, the Burman form pulsing and adjusting like something still deciding what to be. Around her, no movement. No sound. No survivors. An entire army — the kind of army that had nearly destroyed my kingdom, that had killed Fola, that had forced me to use powers I didn't know I had — eliminated by a single creature that looked like a child.
And that child wasn't panting.
Wasn't wounded.
Wasn't even tired.
She was looking at the camera.
Or at whatever was behind the camera.
And smiling.
The same smile as when she was a girl. Innocent. Clean. The smile of someone who has just finished a meal and is satisfied with the result.
I decided to turn off the screen.
In truth, I decided nothing — my body decided for me. The hand rose, pressed the button, and the image vanished before my mind could prevent it. A reflex. The kind of thing the body does when the mind has already surpassed the limit of what it can process and needs someone to cut the signal before something breaks inside.
The car fell silent.
Magnus continued watching. His monitor next to the steering wheel still showed the ending I no longer wanted to see — and from the corner of my eye I noticed he didn't want to either, but couldn't stop. Sometimes horror works that way: it holds you not through pleasure, but through the impossibility of accepting that it's real without confirming to the end.
I stayed staring at the dark of my turned-off monitor. The reflection of my face on the black screen — tired, cut, with dark circles that didn't exist when I first entered the Oasis. The Vivarium still warm in my pocket. The weight of two worlds on my shoulders. And the only question that remained was the one I knew everyone would also ask — every living creature that had seen what I had just seen, at that exact moment, in some corner of the universe.
"How did the Oasis allow something like that to enter its territory?"
The silence didn't answer.
Nor did I expect it to.