Rho Wells Malakai 9d (Lycaeus)

Between-space opens, yields to darkness, to stars. An elegant binary, two yellow-orange suns spin slowly around one another in the distance. Their dance is timeless, an echo of so many similar binaries you've seen in your time amongst the stars. Tiny, rocky worlds bask in their radiance, and as you prepare to approach the closest, scan it and send a mote-probe to the surface, a voice rises out of the stellar static, comes like the cracking tones of a god lost in the depthless night of space.

“Hail and welcome,” the ancient voice says. In the pause, you track the transmission back to its source– a ship, a tiny, one-man ship floating in the void a few thousand kilometers away. Before you can respond, the pilot of the ship speaks again. “I was a traveler like you once, long ago, but the centuries have dulled my desire to explore. I am as much a ship now as I am a man, and in these times, I am content simply to drift derelict, live on forever while the universe expands, contracts and breathes into being new forms of old life.”

Silence falls across the frequency again. Curious, you scan his ship, find no traces of life or living matter aboard. Either the shielding is excellent or the man whose voice you are hearing–

“Tell me, if you be the one,” the old man speaks again, interrupting your thoughts. “Tell me of the stone the crone speaks of or leave this place and let an old man drift through the sea of stars in peace.”

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