Prologue: The Last Light

  Somewhere in the outer void of the Koprulu sector…

  The Spear of Adun, once a gleaming arkship of the Protoss, now drifted through the stars like a wounded beast. Its golden hull, once unmarred and radiant with psionic energy, was cracked and pulsing with veins of alien Zerg biomass, writhing like a cancer.

  Inside the ship, alarms screamed in Khalani script, echoing through hollow halls. Plasma conduits hissed, ruptured by talons. Shrieks of infested crew echoed from the once-hallowed War Council chamber.

  The infestation had begun with a single breach—a Zerg strain unlike any recorded, somehow capable of bypassing Protoss defenses, merging with the warp matrices, and corrupting the very essence of the Khala.

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  At the Solar Core, Executor Altharun, one of the last uninfested aboard, stood before the core’s control obelisk, his ornate armor slick with ichor, one eye blinded from a psionic burn. His voice trembled with pain, but his mind was resolved.

  “This ark must not fall to them. If we cannot purge it…”

  He fed his final command into the neural interface.

  “Then we deny it to them.”

  The wormhole drive, long dormant since the reclamation of Aiur, began to hum—unstable, its energy signature flaring like a dying sun. Rather than plot coordinates, the ship’s corrupted systems were set to activate a random emergency jump, scattering its remnants far from Zerg reach.

  The last thing Altharun saw was a tear in space itself, opening like a great eye, swallowing the ark in a burst of light and shadow.

  In orbit over an unknown desert world…

  A fireball bloomed in the dusky upper atmosphere of Tatooine.

  Moisture farmers glanced skyward. Slaves and traders on the outskirts of Mos Espa paused to shield their eyes. A child named Anakin Skywalker stood in the shadows of Watto’s junkyard, eyes wide, feeling… something.

  Something alive.

  Something calling.

  The wreckage of a forgotten war now burned across Tatooine’s sky, and deep within its shattered core, something stirred—small, newborn, and not entirely Zerg…