Page 26 of Stars in Umbra (The Sable Riders #8)
The Veil Will Burn
MOLAN
M o prowled through the halls and corridors of the Eden II Justice Center.
His eyes raked each exit and all corners, ensuring his team was in place for the final leg of the conference, the top-secret intelligence briefings.
However, lurking at the back of his mind was one intriguing and freakin’ infuriating woman.
Rina’s exit, so calm, yet so chilling, seared into his soul.
It morphed into a vivid nightmare that began with rapturous lovemaking and ended with her storming out of her guest suite like a wildcat in heels.
Leaving behind only her lingering scent on her sheets and the ghost of her kiss on his lips.
Her name echoed in his head, a private mantra.
He repeated it as if it held a hidden power, a magic that might summon her back to him.
His heart roiled with a relentless ache as he sat alone at her breakfast table, his hand wrapped around a cooling mug of kahawa .
Even after he had long exited her suite, her final words still resounded in his mind.
The image of her gaze, proud, angry, and profoundly wounded, burned behind his eyelids every time he closed them.
At some point that first day, he sent her a single message:
‘ If you want to talk, you know where to find me.’
Her response arrived a few hours later. ‘ Sante .’
After that came a heavy, suffocating silence that was now tearing him apart.
It wasn’t a dramatic, theatrical heartbreak.
Instead, it was the slow, agonizing erosion of a man who let his guard down with wariness, only to watch the person he invited into his soul walk away.
His chest ached with it.
His heart fokkin ’ burned.
His mind, most times so steady and measured, spun in tight, frustrating loops of regret and half-spoken truths.
He replayed the moment in his head.
The way her face changed when SableNet translated the Sacran phrase he whispered while inside her.
He recalled how her voice turned clipped, the instant wall that went up between them, and the accusation she flung at him like a blade: ‘You don’t own me, and never will.’
He didn’t want ownership.
What he yearned for was connection; to hold her, not cage her.
He wanted to protect and cherish her, not possess her.
Perhaps he expressed his desire with haste; maybe it was too fast, a tad raw, and unfiltered.
Maybe its ferocity terrified her, as she believed it to be a form of control.
Regardless of the reason, she was avoiding him.
He had access to the security manifests and was well aware she was still in the city, attending the final high-level meetings of the Pegasi Joint Military Conference.
She was likely seated in some closed-door negotiation room just a few floors away, listening to updates on planetary ceasefires while pretending he no longer existed.
The thought gutted him more than he cared to admit.
Still, he had little time for self-pity; he had a busy day ahead.
The ultimate day of the military gathering was upon them, and the official sessions were drawing to a close.
The air hung heavy with the kind of fatigue that followed countless late-night negotiations and far too many drinks at the previous night’s ball.
Most dignitaries had already departed, leaving their harried attachés to handle the diplomatic fallout and last-minute logistics.
Only a handful of stragglers remained, lingering in quiet corners and nursing hangovers behind dark lenses.
It was now, in the soft afterglow of the public-facing conference, that the real work began.
This was when the most clandestine meetings took place, the ones not documented on any program or broadcast for the media.
Key decisions were made in stealthed high-security rooms that would shape the course of Pegasi’s quadrants for decades to come.
At the heart of Eden II’s Justice Center, beneath its stark facade of blackstone and burnished steel, the Riders and their closest allies were assembling in full force.
Filing inside, under Mo’s watchful eye, were some of the most powerful leaders in the quadrant: Kainan and Zane Sable. Selene Sable, in her role as Prime of Dunia, draped in her official signature jade robe.
Also striding in was the steely-eyed Rhesian King Auban, a quiet, calculating man famed for his insight, wisdom, and a soft voice that often cut deeper than any blade.
At the rear was the Galician Sky Commander, General Sargus, his silver-winged insignia glinting against his chest plate.
The blast doors sealed behind them, and the room went silent.
They assembled not to debate policy or planetary borders, but to examine mounting evidence of what some were calling a new power player in the galaxy.
Two months prior, a remote mining colony on Luxithra had gone dark.
When reconnaissance drones arrived, they found scorched earth, fused metal, and no living beings.
Neither signs of struggle, nor survivors, nor plasma burns, nor standard weapons signatures.
Then, a communications array on Korvan’s Rim went offline.
The station shutdown at the critical relay station followed an identical pattern: an instant blackout, every trace of life erased.
Worse, no demands and zero declarations.
Just a silent, surgical, and thorough devastation. Rumors spread through the outer rings like wildfire.
Rumors spread of ships gutted mid-transit, entire crews deranged by visions, and blinked out of existence.
Entire outposts were silenced, their sensor logs wiped clean.
Those that survived went insane, muttering in extinct languages about a celestial gate cracking open.
The phrase that returned most often, found etched in stone at the affected locations, whispered in static, or spoken through bleeding lips, was chilling: ‘ When Sulfiqar wakes, the veil will burn .’
Earlier that morning, Mirage intercepted an anonymous message buried deep in the dark: a triple-encrypted data packet marked to the attention of the Sable Riders.
She pulled it up on the holo-display in private, her voice quieter than usual as she shared it with Mo.
‘I’m not sure why it is addressed to us,’ she explained. ‘Still, the language is ancient Sacranskript. The translation is uncertain, but I did my best.’
She displayed the statement in Sacranskript. ‘ When the scythe-bearer unites with his kin to fight for Sulfiqar, the god on high, the lesser deities will fall and their flames will torch the cosmos. ’
Mo stared at the words. ‘Sulfiqar?’
Mirage nodded once. ‘The idiom matches an old Sacran prophecy. The glyphic structure is identical to passages found in the Vault of Temeth, an ancient temple found in the deserts of Eden II. We need to find out what this means and send a report to Kainan and Zane.’
He clenched his jaw, then tapped into his Iccythrian intelligence web, a shadowy circuit of smugglers, slicers, black-market oracles, and mind-scrubbed seers loyal to his bloodline.
If anything real were stirring beneath the chatter, if a fallen god were rousing to sow a shit storm, his network would know.
However, every whisper returned amorphous results: no names, no faces, no intel, no coordinates, just whispers of old wives’ tales and mythos waking, coming back to life.
Mo didn’t dabble in superstition or folklore, but he had a measure of respect for the darkening shadows in places already stripped of most light.
He acted at once.
He raised the threat index, activated full-spectrum defense protocol across Eden II’s perimeter, and rerouted two squads of elite guards to the observation decks above the conference halls.
If the god of war was stirring, if this Sulfiqar’s return was more than a myth, then anyone who followed him might strike.
Now, Mo stood on the exterior of the secure room, built with nine layers of reinforced alloy.
Stealth fields blocked all outside signals.
The summit was a fortress, and he made it so; every door sealed, each corridor swept.
Drone patrols ran offset loops, and facial and gait recognition scanned every guest. Even the culinary staff had been vetted and subjected to neural resonance and retinal checks.
Still, his instincts screamed it wasn’t enough.
Regardless, he keyed the blast doors to double-seal the secure room.
They locked, their sensors being ion-resistant, motion-reactive, and triple-fail safe enabled.
Only Kainan had the overrides to open it from within the room.
Mo, confident all was safe and sound, prowled away, moving to his guard station, a glass office at the rear of the venue.
He strode in, lifting his chin to the surveillance specialist techs manning the screens.
The room’s main focal point was a bank of monitors, where they had eyes on the VIP doorway at all times.
After a quick debrief with his Sable Security tactical team, Mo sank into a chair with a sigh.
He let his head fall back on the cushioned rest and eased a finger under the collar of his matte-black uniform to loosen it.
Only then did he permit his mind to wander.
He thought of her .
The curl of her lip when she laughed at him over a glass of wine.
The beautiful lines of her spine in her backless dress as she walked away from him at the ball.
Her moans when he ravaged her as he brought her to sensual incandescence .
Fokk , he missed her so much it sickened him.
With a curse, he knifed forward, opened his comm tab, and shelved her from his mind, unable to think of her anymore.
Without warning, a spike hit his brain like a sniper’s bullet.
Mo flinched, his vertebrae jerking upright as a jolt carved through the base of his skull.
He threw a hand over his braided hair, clutching the back of his cranium, as his jaw locked in agony.
The moment the pain lanced through his head, the walls narrowed, the air thinned, and his eyesight tunneled into red.
One crimson pulse flashed behind his eyes.
Then another.
This wasn’t standard, nor was it a result of fatigue from too little sleep.
This was a command from a neural nucleus buried deep within the architecture of his brain stem.