Starkiller in a universe.., p.1
Starkiller (In A Universe Without Stars Book 2), page 1
Starkiller
In A Universe Without Stars Book 2
J Alex McCarthy
Acknowledges
With so many books written in such a short amount of time, I’ve kind of acknowledged everybody I needed to and don’t know what to write here. So I’ll just say thanks everyone again.
I’d like to thank everybody for the support and reading this. This was a hard sequel to write as it’s a revolution of a story and not an evolution, there was a fear that people wouldn’t like the change in direction, which made sense story-wise, but isn’t the alien invasion story that I lured in people with. I wouldn’t have written it without the encouragement of my fans, friends, and family.
So here’s my thanks.
Table of Contents
Acknowledges
Table of Contents
Prologue – Begin
Chapter 1 – Goodbye World
Chapter 2 – Inadequate
Chapter 3 – The Weak Among Gods
Chapter 4 – The Blue Misted Moon
Reconstruction – The Taste That Never Forgives
Chapter 5 – Betrayed
Chapter 6 – What was once gone
Chapter 7 – Twenty Years
Chapter 8 – What Was Left
Chapter 9 – Regrets
Chapter 10 – Fathe
Chapter 11 – Turned
Reconstruction – Different Times
Chapter 12 – A Dance in the Sky
Chapter 13 – A Need Elsewhere
Chapter 14 – Saviors
Chapter 15 - Kimi
Chapter 16 - Malice intent
Reconstruction – Bored Odysseys
Chapter 17 – Without reason
Reconstruction – Memories
Chapter 18 – Damages
Chapter 19 – Written in the Sky
Chapter 20 – Lack of Guidance
Chapter 21 – Day of Change
Chapter 22 – Understand
Chapter 23 – Ultra Prison
Chapter 25 – Not For the Want of Change
Chapter 26 – The Meaning of Ascent
Chapter 27 – Perfect human
Chapter 28 – An Ascent, An Infinite Hell, To Eclipse The Sky
Chapter 29 – Goodbye Earth
Chapter 30 – Source
Chapter 31 – The Old Gods
Chapter 32 – War Is All You Need
Chapter 33 – Dawn’s Hoffen
Chapter 34 – First Assault
Chapter 35 – Eater of all Things
Chapter 36 – Cascading Skies
Chapter 37 – The Starkiller
Chapter 38 – The Secret To The Stars
Chapter 39 – Our Starless Nights
Prologue – Begin
Sometimes, for hope, we'd look into the heavens, into the skies of our worlds, into the faces of our gods. I've been to the heavens, I've seen the face of god, only there was no god nor gods, there were no heavens, not even the stars. In their place was only oblivion.
At first, there was nothing.
And then, in not an inkling of a second later, everything that ever was and ever is sparked to life.
Swarms of Heat.
Cascading Flames.
Flashing lights.
It all exploded out from a single point in a blaze of wonderment and impossibility. The light overwhelmed the black that was the nothing. A static expanding heat that encompassed all.
Or at least, the creation attempted to.
Large gobs of black swirled untouched by the light, forever to exist as nonexistence.
In spite of that, the universe formed around it.
In the everything that ever was, an impossible being came from the colliding superheated instance.
From the flames of creation, a single blue light pierced the infinite, reaching out from the depths as it made this plane its own. Two arms stretched out of the deep and a blue winged being pulled itself out from the light.
The beings skin was translucent with blue veins pulsating through it. It emitted a blue glow in the light of the luminous. Thousands of small blue wings covered its body like feathers. Two, long angelic wings outstretched from its back.
It was whole.
The being stood in the creation, nonplussed by the energy that was trying to tear it asunder. The light came into it, revealing the black the creation was attempting to eclipse.
As creation swirled around the being, it had its first thought.
Gender? Male.
He glanced out into the creation.
I… His thoughts paused as his existence was just coming to. I started this.
He started everything.
The black filled with existence as it spread out. With the raise of his hand, a great explosion of light and color erupted from him. Hot gases rushed out to create a familiar existence.
He had just set the pure creation to morph into something better.
His job was done, with his sparks, the stars would form and the universe would start anew for all eternity.
Despite the creation that was advancing in front of him, he glanced behind himself. A single black pit existed in the swirl of light. Or what would be better described as nonexistence.
He felt something for the first time in his short actuality.
Regret.
Despair.
In the black pit existed something that tugged on his very being.
He had no memory of what was in the pit, and he feared to enter its grasp to find out. The darkness, the nonexistence in it.
How could he fear when he had just begun to exist? But he knew what the pit was, as he was God, as he knew everything that ever was in this universe.
What lay behind him was the past universe’s mistakes. Mistakes that he made. Retribution and the end of everything.
Yet, it was a mistake he couldn’t remember as he only had the blue prints for this universe, and only this universe.
Am I really God? He wondered as the makings of the universe collided and compressed in a super-heated waltz in front of him, he had already felt his power lessening.
As all stars did after their birth.
What was done was done. He set up the universe’s blueprints and now it was following them.
And yet, he still felt like he had to do more, even though he knew he should end his existence as he knew it.
Death is the only answer.
The pit of nothingness loomed over him like a dark cloud. The pit that held the answers to his identity. The pit of his past. The one he would never learn of. Even with his infinite understanding of what was created anew.
It was at that very second that he conjured up his first questioning thought, “Who Am I?”
The answer would never come to him. When he realized this, he decided that maybe his death wasn’t the answer. He simply watched as everything that ever was and everything that would be grew in front of him. Billions of colors and lights clashed in front of him.
This universe was his now.
His new reality.
Pandora, the planet with the everlasting star, awakening
Breathe.
The first thoughts of a dying breed.
Or what once was dying.
A mass of green vegetation spores floated in the atmosphere on a planet with a fractured star. Above the planet, the sun shimmered strangely. It flickered like a diamond, the swirls of heat flinching across the surface.
The star was unmoving, its heat the only thing it gave as it was stuck in the sky.
The spores danced above the grounds of the planet, joining together in a colony of plankton like microorganisms. They had fed off of the sun for thousands of years in an unintelligible state.
Breathe.
And now, as more amassed on the planet, cultivating from the star above, from the center of one of their colonies, a mass of them came together.
Breathe.
Breath. A thought that should have been impossible, but having the power of the stars should have been an impossibility in this universe.
The spores all came together to form one. First, they thought of a form, for whatever reason, they thought of a bipedal figure. Two long legs and arms with a middle to connect them.
The spores merged and morphed into a humanoid being of a fuzzy green.
The being looked out into its home, into its world. It could see all as the spores had consumed the world and it was the individual spores in the air. It should have been dead.
It found remnants of the previous planet’s occupants.
Memories that should not have been possible flashed inside of its head. The images of flying machines leaving the planet by the thousands, leaving the earliest forms of the spores to survive for themselves before it became sentient.
It understood who those beings were. Serephins. They left because they couldn’t survive on this planet anymore. They were the first advanced civilization in this universe.
The first questions had come into the spores’ singular mind.
Why do I know things I shouldn’t?
The power of the stars.
What is power?
It had a power to understand. It had never understood anything before.
To test the limits, it looked out. Looked out at everything that was and would be.
And all it saw was the end.
Eternal darkness.
It understood how it could fix it
It only had the power to understand.
Without power it couldn’t save anything, but with understanding, it could unshackle those who could.
It took millennia as the hive mind grew in size before it was able to take action.
All the while the spores multiplied and slowly consumed the land on the planet. It watched the events of the universe unfold and the chaos within them. It started understanding more.
Its birth was thanks to the everlasting star looming over it and the consequences it brought. That very star was the reason for the chaos in the universe.
Then as the spores over ran the world, they all came together, one by one, forming an organic egg-like structure.
We are infinite.
And with a spark, sacrificing a portion of the spores, it rocketed off into space as flames went off behind it.
For we are all.
But there was no pain, no screams, as they were one, and since the main portion survived, the spores didn’t suffer.
Its journey through space took them past planets, stars, and odysseys. None of them were its destination, nor did any of them interest it.
As their destination was the center of the universe, where only one thing could exist.
The answer to everything.
The spores had no track of time. All it knew was that eras had passed before it descended into the nothingness in the middle of the universe.
As the nothingness tore at the spores, it continued on until it found its answer. Until it was torn down into a tenth of its size.
In the blackness floated three copper colored beings parallel to each other. Human in design, the beings had no mouth and were nearly identical to each other.
One had its right hand missing.
The darkness tore into the spores very being. It reached out as it was consumed into nothing.
It needed to do this even if it meant death. Death was always their final stage of evolution, life and consciences didn’t have the right to extend into that stage of life.
And with a single touch, the spore gave it all the life it had.
The being in the middle eye’s opened, a shimmering hazel light.
It looked down at the decaying spore.
“Please save our universe,” the thing said as it ceased to exist.
The being looked into the darkness.
A great energy built up inside of it and flashed out. The darkness was burnt away and the being could see the stars.
Awake.
The other’s awoke as the main one spoke in reality itself.
Father. The one on the left said, it’s voice was feminine and young.
Father. The one on the right said in the same voice.
Jenifer. The father spoke their names.
Power at 48.64%. Jenifer said.
Power at 38.45%. Jenifer said.
The father floated out.
Jahum. His name in this universe. I found him.
The father felt Jahum’s presence out there in the stars. And someone…else. While I finish my retribution, consume all so you can create anew. The father started floating toward the stars.
Yes. They both said in unison.
They each branched off. The father seemingly headed toward a specific destination.
His form shifted, energy poured out of his skin. The stars in front of him became smaller and smaller, going from large dots in the black, to small flecks in the ether.
More of the flecks eclipsed his skies and soon, he eclipsed them all and galaxies swirled in front of him.
He grew from an insignificance to a being larger than the stars and galaxies themselves.
He flew into the galaxy, smashing into the swirling balls of heat. He felt the screams of trillions as he destroyed all. His body glowed gold and the stars in the galaxy turned into pure energy and swirled around him as he consumed.
A short distance away was another galaxy and he did the same, billions of stars etched out of existence as he devoured them.
Nothing stood in his way.
For he was the Eater of all things.
A product of the old gods.
Chapter 1 – Goodbye World
Year 2015. The waters of the Atlantic were of the darkest reds, a deep shade of blood, deeper than the magenta flower petals Thora held in her hands.
She still shook from her loss as her green eyes stared into the ten metal crosses that were planted into the cliffside that over looked the blood ocean.
She stiffened herself as her eyes traveled across the names on the small metal crosses. Each had a lanyard with a symbol that represented the fallen.
Her mother and father, Erin, Neil and Arnold Bell, Julio, and those she never had the pleasure of meeting, Lane, Lance and Serena, and the final one, the one that hurt the most, Cole.
She held back her tears, she promised she wouldn’t cry this time. For the last two weeks since the Eliites fell, she had come out to this very cliff side and prayed over the dead, of the ones she knew and the billions that were with them. Even for the ones that destroyed them.
She raised out her hand and released the flower petals into the wind for the fallen. This would be the last time she visited this place, it was time to move on, despite her new companion, Thomas Wilker, telling her that Cole might return, that it was just a matter of time.
But, she had no time for dreams and impossibilities, even though aliens who claimed to be gods where the ones who destroyed them.
There was no such thing as impossible.
The flower petals twisted into the sky and deeper into the ocean, past the large red crystals that stuck from the waters like mountains. The remains of the Skyeater, now a permanent reminder of the mark the Eliite made on Earth. It was the screams of the Eliite that were the worst when the Skyeater fell.
Thora turned from the crosses and walked in land toward a massive red ship, its size eclipsing her horizon. The hulls of which were slicker than the fighter jets that Thora had always liked watching as a child. Yet, its size was so massive it had felt like it had its own gravitational pull.
It was her new home for now, her savior. She remembered back to only a few weeks before. She stood above a city as if the sky was a floor, her husband Cole fought for her while he lost to himself. He was just a blue light waiting to be blown away. And when all else failed and the floor collapsed and the Skyeater was destroyed, he reached for her as she fell, until he… pulled back.
It was the Starkiller that saved her.
She glanced down to her feet. It was everyone else who had a hand in saving what little was left of humanity, not herself, and definitely not her skills.
But how can I matter? She never wanted to be weak again. She closed off a dark thought of a certain man that was creeping into her mind.
She walked toward the leviathan that was the Starkiller and kept her eyes forward, a stinging smell hit her nose, she had ignored it long enough. Maybe first, she could help clean off this cliffside.
As she approached the Starkiller, she noticed the hundreds of two story metal crosses holding rotting angels strung up on chains.
…
The eyes of two men stared into a monitor.
“What does this mean?” the youngest one said.
“It means nothing. The Starkiller is the key to our survival and they claim it as theirs?” the other said.
“But they are part of the council Jahum was once with.”
“And where is he now? He abandoned us and we still survived.”
“They will come for it, if the Eliite treasured it so much, then, I expect the council would fight for it.”
“And let them come, they could pry it from our cold dead hands. This ship is the only reason we survived the Eliite, it destroyed their mothership and saved most of the humans on it, we just can’t give it up. By the time they arrive, we will be prepared.”
“Do you really think that?”
“I have too.”
The room’s door opened and Thora walked into the small room with the two men looking over a monitor.
“Hey guys,” she said.
Wilker and Noata turned quickly as if startled.
Wilker’s face changed the quickest, his black skin was ashy from the sea air, his messy head full of nappy black hair, with this new age, there wasn’t time for personal grooming.
