10 - Magnus

And I had swallowed it whole.

It was a skeleton. Humanoid, but wrong. Too tall, the limbs too long, the skull elongated into a smooth, featureless dome. Its ribcage was fused into a single plate of bone, and inside that cage, where a heart should be, pulsed a sphere of liquid light—the purest astralidium I’d ever seen.

Tears cut tracks through the grime on my face. “Don’t.” magnus 10

I ran my pre-drill checks. Biometrics: normal. Hull integrity: stable. Neural link to the ship’s AI, callsign “Oracle”: green.

Day one started with a lie.

“Oracle,” I choked out. “Emergency ascent. Cut the drill. Now.”

The first thing they told you about Magnus 10 was that it didn’t care. Not about your medals, your IQ, or the desperate prayers you whispered into your helmet’s recycled air. The planet was a raw, iron-rich scar across the star charts—a super-Eclipse shrouded in perpetual storms and a magnetic field that could scramble a neural link from orbit. And I had swallowed it whole

Magnus 11. Last of his line.

Non-natural. That word sat in my gut like a stone. Magnus 10 was supposed to be dead—a molten, metal-cored brute with no history of life. But something down there was twisting the magnetic field into patterns. Too tall, the limbs too long, the skull