The route had never mattered. Some mornings I left a station with a destination in mind. Most days, I simply undocked, aligned toward the nearest unexplored constellation and let my probes decide where the journey would lead.

Voyager slipped from system to system across the familiar regions of New Eden while my scanner swept each one for cosmic signatures. Some resolved into relic sites already claimed by other explorers. Others became forgotten gas reservoirs or unstable combat anomalies. Most I ignored after identifying them.

I was searching for something else.

A wormhole.

Somewhere beyond the next gate, an unstable connection would eventually appear. It always did. A temporary bridge into Anoikis where another rescue cache might need tending, another forgotten beacon might require fresh supplies before the passage collapsed and a new route opened elsewhere.

It had become a ritual over the years.

Scan.

Resolve.

Enter.

Tend the cache.

Return.

Continue.

There was a quiet comfort in that routine. Anoikis was never predictable, but the search for it had become second nature. Thousands of wormholes crossed, thousands of systems visited, yet every new signature still carried the same small promise that had first drawn me beyond empire space years ago.

Perhaps this one would lead somewhere I had never seen.

I launched the probes once more.

Allison projected the expanding scan spheres across the tactical display as Voyager settled into a slow orbit around one of the planet’s moon.

One signature.
Then another.
A third.

The first resolved into a gas reservoir, the second collapsed into a relic site, the last remained.

I narrowed the scan again.

99.4%.
100%.

The identification appeared across the display, an unstable wormhole, finally.

I recalled the probes, brought Voyager about, and aligned toward the anomaly. The warp engines answered with their familiar hum, and the stars stretched into pale ribbons around the ship.

I dropped from warp seventy kilometers from the anomaly.

The words escaped almost as a whisper.

“This is not an ordinary wormhole.”

Massive fragments of black stone floated silently around the aperture, each one torn apart as though shattered by an unimaginable force. Their surfaces were jagged, almost metallic, streaked with veins of pale crystalline growth that caught the light in cold blue reflections. Countless smaller fragments drifted between them, forming slow rivers of debris that seemed to spiral toward the heart of the anomaly.

The site itself felt… constructed.

Not by hands.

But by intent.

The debris did not appear scattered by chance. Each fragment occupied its own place, suspended in a silent procession around the wormhole, as though the surrounding space had been carefully broken apart and left exactly as it was meant to remain.

The familiar sphere of distorted space was there, yet it bore little resemblance to the countless wormholes I had crossed before. Its eye was impossibly dark, a crimson abyss so deep that even the surrounding light seemed reluctant to approach it.

Long streams of red vapor stretched toward its center, twisting and folding into one another before vanishing into the darkness beyond the event horizon. They did not resemble clouds carried by solar winds. They looked… pulled. As though something beyond the aperture was drawing the very fabric of space through an opening far too small to contain it.

I had stood before thousands of unstable wormholes.

Blue.
Green.
Golden.

Even those stained by the strange energies of shattered systems.

None of them had ever felt like this.

Ordinary wormholes invited curiosity.

This one inspired caution.

Its presence weighed upon the senses in a way I struggled to explain. The darkness surrounding its eye was not empty. It felt dense, oppressive, as though the anomaly itself radiated an invisible pressure that reached far beyond its crimson veil.

For the first time in a long while…

I hesitated before a wormhole.

I let Voyager drift toward the anomaly until the crimson eye filled the canopy.

The vibration reached me long before the hull touched the event horizon. A deep, almost imperceptible resonance travelled through the pod, through the fluid surrounding my capsule, into my own body. It wasn’t violent. It was steady. Rhythmic.

Almost…

Inviting.

I reached for the navigation controls.

“Let’s see where you lead.”

The microwarp coils disengaged as Voyager slipped into the crimson darkness.

For an instant, every sensation disappeared.

No sound.
No light.
No movement.

Then…

The universe returned.

Silence.

Not the familiar silence of space, but something heavier.

Everything beyond the canopy had changed.

The stars I had left behind were gone.

The brilliant blues-green and golden nebulae that had accompanied me before had vanished beneath an endless ocean of crimson clouds. They stretched across the entire sky, layer upon layer, drifting so slowly that they seemed frozen in time. Their darker folds swallowed the light before releasing it again in faint red reflections that gave the entire system the appearance of existing beneath an immense celestial storm.

Ahead of Voyager, the system’s star burned like an ember.

Its crimson light struggled through the surrounding haze, casting long scarlet rays that dissolved into the clouds before reaching the emptiness beyond. It illuminated the system, yet somehow never conquered the darkness surrounding it.

Even space itself felt…

Different.

Not empty.

Occupied.

As though the vacuum possessed a weight I had never experienced before.

I remained motionless, allowing Voyager to drift while my eyes wandered across the impossible landscape.

The instruments quietly confirmed what I already knew.
I had not simply travelled through another wormhole.
I had entered an another world.

Pochven.

For several long moments, I simply watched, then my eyes were drawn toward the star.

Unlike any sun I had observed anywhere else, its light possessed an unnatural intensity. It did not simply illuminate the system. It pulsed, as though something beneath its surface disturbed the rhythm of the star itself.

Curiosity overcame caution.

I aligned Voyager and engaged warp.

The crimson clouds stretched around the ship before collapsing once more as I emerged near the star.

The sight before me stole my breath.

An immense ring surrounded the star, so vast that it seemed insignificant beside the colossal sphere of burning plasma it embraced. Dark skeletal structures reached toward the stellar surface from every direction, anchored by towering frameworks that disappeared into the crimson glare. Between them, countless lattices, conduits and immense articulated arms formed a machine whose scale defied comprehension.

Then I saw it.

A brilliant stream of crimson-white energy arced from the star itself.

Not erupting naturally.

Drawn.

The beam remained perfectly stable as it flowed from the stellar surface into the waiting structure, disappearing within its immense framework before scattering into countless smaller currents that raced along the surrounding arrays. It was as though the machine had reached into the heart of the star itself, extracting something far beyond simple energy.

I slowed Voyager to a halt.

The only sound inside the pod was the quiet hum of the ship’s systems.

“Allison?”

The response came almost immediately.

“Structure identified. Dazh Porevitium Transmuter.”

The name meant nothing to me.

Data slowly unfolded across the tactical display.

A stellar harvesting installation.

A construct of Triglavian design built not merely to orbit a star, but to transform it. The immense arrays surrounding the core penetrated deep into the stellar body, harvesting resources through processes that modern science barely understood. Every cycle altered the star itself, reshaping its nature while feeding unimaginable quantities of energy into the vast machinery surrounding it.

I looked back toward the burning crimson beam.

No…

Harvesting did not seem like the right word.

It looked as though the machine was rewriting the star.

“Not every wormhole leads to Anoikis.”