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I'm just starting this out to see how things go and hopefully I can really make this look good, so this will change soon
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The Last Sentinel The city of Arathor was dying.
Above its silver towers, the crimson skies had cracked open into burning light. Sirens wailed through the streets as the energy grids failed one by one, their hum replaced by the cries of millions.
And deep beneath those towers, in the Command Chamber of the Planetary Defense Council, Varek-Ra watched his world end.
He had always been a soldier, bred for duty, tempered in loyalty. His armor, black with gold circuitry, was scarred from years of war along the Rift Fronts. He had fought to preserve Arathor’s empire, to protect the promise of unity and order.
Now all of it was dust.
“Commander,” said Trelis, his second-in-command, voice trembling. “They’re evacuating the Council. Zanth-Ra and his wife escaped earlier. There’s talk they sent their child off-world.”
Varek’s jaw tightened. “Cowardice disguised as compassion,” he muttered. “He should have stayed to fight.”
Trelis hesitated. “There is no fight left, sir. The core’s collapsing. The fleets are gone. Arathor...”
“There is always a fight,” Varek snapped, the words like steel scraping against the last shreds of hope. His eyes burned, not from rage, but from grief too heavy to name. “If Arathor burns, then someone must carry its flame.”
He turned toward the viewport. The planet’s red sun was dimming, consumed by the expanding fracture in the sky.
He thought of Kira, his wife, her laughter, soft and steady, the way she scolded him for coming home late from patrols. He thought of his daughter Sera, barely nine, always waiting at the landing pad with a wooden model of his ship.
He had promised her he’d come back.
Now, he never would.
He thought of Zanth-Ra, his brother. They had grown up training side by side, dreaming of a future where Arathor would lead the stars. But in the end, Zanth had fled, chosen love and family over duty. Over him.
The betrayal cut deeper than any blade.
“Trelis,” Varek said quietly. “Go. Find what’s left of your family. Don’t look back.”
Trelis opened his mouth to protest, but one look at Varek’s eyes silenced him. He saluted once and ran.
Varek stood alone as the tremors began. The city above was collapsing, the heavens folding inward. Yet below, in the forbidden Vaults, the Aether Forge pulsed like a heartbeat, an ancient relic said to reshape matter, even life itself.
Varek found his way to the vaults. No longer guarded as they should have been. He made his way to relic, then stepped into its blinding light.
His armor melted first, then his flesh, his bones, his memories. The Forge tore him apart molecule by molecule and remade him into something else.
When he emerged, he was not fully flesh, nor spirit. Silver energy pulsed through his veins. His eyes glowed faintly, reflecting neither sorrow nor warmth.
Arathor was gone.
But its Sentinel still lived.
~ ~ ~
Years passed with Varek drifting through the void between stars, the fragments of his mind latched onto transmissions from a small blue planet.
Earth.
Primitive. Divided. Chaotic.
And yet...alive.
Through its endless waves of data, he learned the impossible, Zanth-Ra’s son had survived. The lost child of Arathor lived among humans, passing as one of them.
The son of the man who betrayed everything now played savior to them.
The thought burned like acid.
Zanth-Ra’s legacy was alive, wearing a false crown of light. The boy, Ozymandias, saved cities, rescued innocents, and gave speeches about hope.
Hope.
Varek almost laughed. He had seen what hope did to worlds. It made them hesitate. It made them weak.
And weakness had killed his wife.
Weakness had buried his daughter in fire.
Weakness had made his brother run.
No. This world would not fall the same way.
He landed on Earth in the dead of night, wrapped in flame and silence. His ship disintegrated over the Pacific, his body reforming in the ash as a man of bronze skin and dull gray eyes. He learned quickly. The human internet was a labyrinth, but to him it was child’s play.
He called himself Victor Rayner.
A decorated engineer, a war veteran, a quiet genius in the service of a government too blind to question his origins. In the shadows, he began constructing the Aether core, a weapon forged from fragments of his people’s lost science, capable of bending gravity, matter, and perhaps fate itself.
To the world, he was a visionary.
To himself, he was the last guardian of order.
~ ~ ~
Sometimes, when the lab lights dimmed, he saw them again. Kira’s eyes. Sera’s laughter. He would reach out, but the image would dissolve in the glow of the Aether core.
Then, on a screen across the lab, the news would flicker, Ozymandias, the shining god of Chicago, saving lives with the same abilities his father once used to abandon their world.
And the ache inside Varek would harden again.
He watched the young man raise fallen towers, shield the innocent, inspire billions.
And he whispered, almost gently:
“I do not hate him, Zanth-Ra. I understand him. He believes he’s doing good. But good is fragile. It breaks.”
He touched the Aether core, feeling its pulse merge with his own hollow heart.
“When it breaks,” he murmured, “I will be the one left standing to rebuild.”
He lifted his gaze toward the distant stars, toward the ashes of his home.
“Your son will learn what you could not,” he said softly. “That mercy is not strength. That compassion is not order. That I am the last Sentinel of Arathor...and I will save this world—”
His eyes burned silver, the glow swallowing the darkness.
“—even if I must break it first.”
~ ~ ~
The first time Ozymandias and Varek-Ra saw each other, it wasn’t in a battle.
It was in silence, on the roof of a burning skyscraper overlooking the Chicago River.
The fire had started in the lower levels of Harrow Dynamics, a weapons research firm that had been quietly repurposing alien alloys for the military. The building was collapsing from within, beams bending, glass raining down like molten snow.
Through the smoke, a figure in gold and indigo descended, cape torn, eyes glowing faintly in the dark. Ozymandias landed on the roof with a shockwave that rippled the dust from the steel.
He heard voices below, people trapped. He lifted a piece of collapsed debris, flame licking at his shoulders. It didn’t hurt him, but he could feel the building dying. Even with his strength, he might not save everyone in time.
Then he heard another voice, calm, steady, almost disappointed.
“You shouldn’t waste your power on ashes, boy.”
Ozymandias turned.
Standing near the edge of the roof was a man in a black overcoat, silver hair catching the firelight. His eyes, gray, cold, unreadable, watched him the way a teacher watches a student about to fail an exam. In his gloved hand, a small metal sphere hovered, spinning slowly with faint blue light.
“Get back!” Ozymandias barked. “The structure’s unstable—”
“I know,” the man interrupted. “I designed it.”
Ozymandias froze. His Infrared vision flickered instinctively, no hostile intent detected, but there was something else. Energy. Familiar.
“You...” he said slowly, “you’re not human.”
The man’s lips twitched into a faint, bitter smile. “Neither are you.”
Lightning flashed in the distance, reflecting in both their eyes, one burning gold, one silver.
Ozymandias stepped forward. “Who are you?”
“A ghost,” the man said softly, his voice resonating like metal against memory. “The last Sentinel of a dead world.”
The words hung in the air, heavy and hollow.
For a heartbeat, Ozymandias felt something stir deep within him, an echo, a half-remembered whisper from years ago, when he first activated the holographic recording hidden within his pod.
There was another...a guardian who always put duty above all else. He was my brother in all but blood. I had to make a choice the day Arathor fell. I chose you, and your mother. But I will never forget Varek-Ra.
The name struck him like thunder breaking over glass. His pulse quickened.
“You… you survived Arathor,” Ozymandias breathed, disbelief giving way to awe. “What’s your name?”
The man’s gaze flickered, the faintest shimmer of silver behind his eyes.
“Varek-Ra,” he said at last. Then, with a bitter smile that didn’t reach his face, added, “Or rather, what’s left of him.”
He took a step closer, the air around him thrumming faintly with contained power.
“And you, child,” Varek said, voice low, reverent, and cold all at once, “you are Anth, son of Zanth-Ra.”
The roof groaned beneath them, flames reaching higher, glass bursting from the heat. But the world felt frozen in that moment.
“How did you survive?” Ozymandias asked.
“I endured,” Varek corrected. “And I observe. I watched you squander what remains of our people’s legacy, saving these creatures who will never understand you, never trust you.”
He gestured toward the city below, sirens wailing, crowds filming through the smoke.
“They will cheer for you until they fear you. Then they will cage you. That is their nature.”
Ozymandias shook his head. “You’re wrong. They need hope.”
“Hope?” Varek’s voice darkened. “Hope is what blinded Arathor while its enemies devoured it from within. We believed in mercy. In patience. In understanding. And we were annihilated.”
He stepped closer, the wind tugging at his coat, revealing faint veins of light glowing beneath his skin.
“I will not let it happen again. Earth will not fall to chaos like our world did. I will make it perfect.”
“You can’t force perfection,” Ozymandias said quietly. “You can only inspire it.”
“Inspiration fades. Order endures.”
Varek’s hand tightened around the hovering sphere. “When they see the sky burn, they will finally understand.”
Ozymandias realized, with a sinking feeling, what the device was.
“You’re going to activate a bomb.”
“It won't destroy them. It'll elevate them,” Varek said, almost tenderly. “I'll reshape the planet. No borders. No war. No choice.”
“And no freedom,” Christopher said. “You’d rather rule than believe.”
Varek looked at him for a long time, then sighed, almost mournfully.
“You have your father’s eyes. Always questioning. Always doubting. But tell me, child of mercy, when this world turns against you, when they call you monster instead of savior, what will you believe in then?”
“I’ll believe in them,” Ozymandias said. “Even when they don’t believe in me.”
Varek’s expression softened just for a heartbeat. There was something human there, grief, regret, maybe even pride.
“Then you’re already lost,” he said, and hurled the sphere he'd been carrying into the air.
Instinct took over. Ozymandias shot upward, shattering through fire and smoke, grabbing the device midair before it could ignite. He rocketed into the sky, hurling it miles above the city. It detonated in a silent pulse of blue light, nonlethal, but enough to turn night into false daylight.
Below, Varek watched him ascend, watched the boy become a comet across the skyline.
He felt no anger. Only certainty.
“He’ll see,” Varek murmured. “When they break him, he’ll see I was right.”
And for the briefest moment, as he disappeared into the shadows, the faintest whisper of sorrow followed him.
Because even now, some part of Varek-Ra, the soldier, the protector, the man who once swore to guard life...still wanted to believe the boy could prove him wrong.
Word Count: 1885 |
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