Sector: Alchion Spur, Near the Outer Wreath of the Hadros Cluster
Star: Virellia
Gravity: 0.87G
Atmosphere: Thin, nitrogen-heavy with trace argon
We made landfall twelve hours ago. The descent wasn’t easy—one of the stabilization fins on Heuristia locked halfway into atmospheric entry, forcing us to reroute through a narrower corridor between pressure bands. It rattled like a dying animal all the way down. For a moment, I thought we’d black out against the side of the continent.
But we didn’t.
Draethis-IV is silence carved into stone. The kind that makes your thoughts louder than you’d like them to be. A world of dust, wind, and long-forgotten relics. The tower we found—if you can call something that size a "tower"—pierces the sky like a broken tooth from the gods. Black stone, obsidian-like, weathered by time and wind. It’s old. Far older than anything humans have laid eyes on in this region.
I circled it alone for hours, boots crunching against the brittle surface. No glyphs. No ornament. Only age.
We’ve scanned the structure: solid core, no entryways, no radiation leaks, no sign of power or data flow. And yet… the magnetometer ticks every time I get near it, as if it's listening.
The sky here is painted with a slow, majestic sadness. The gas giant Draethis-Prime dominates the horizon—banded, luminous, impossibly large. Its pull creates violent micro-tides in the thin crust of this world, but here, in this dry basin, everything remains still.
At night, the dust glows faintly—some kind of photoluminescent particulate in the upper sediment. It shimmers when the wind moves. One of the team said it looked like the dreams of a sleeping civilization. Maybe that’s what this place is: the memory of a people long since vanished, preserved in stone and silence.
They left no written record, no sign of conflict or decay. Just this tower, and the sky, and the weight of time itself.
Maybe this is what reverence looks like when a species knows it’s the last thing they’ll leave behind.
As I sat at the base of the monolith this evening, I remembered a line from the Solan poet Veyra Manthi:
"To be forgotten is the last cruelty. To be found, the first grace."
We may never know their names, but we found them.
That must count for something.
– Cmdr. Elian Rowe
Planetary Survey Division, Outer Reach Program
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