The dome was nothing special.

  It sat at the edge of a wind-blown settlement on a quiet moon called Ellira-9, nestled between dunes of copper-colored sand and a sky that blinked zily with two suns. The air outside carried the soft tang of metal and dust, and the wind whispered through broken antennae with the kind of emptiness that only forgotten pces knew.

  Inside, the temperature was always perfect. The lights never flickered. The coffee never burned.

  That alone was enough to start rumors.

  Maren worked the morning shift at the smallest cafeteria in the sector. It had six tables, two booths, and a cracked countertop that had somehow survived five ownership changes, a minor sandquake, and a stray meteorite twenty years ago. The dome's outer shell groaned on stormy nights, and the food distributor coughed twice before producing anything.

  But customers kept coming.

  Not in crowds. Not loudly. Just steadily. Like they didn't know why, only that something about the pce felt... lighter. Calmer.

  Like it listened.

  Maren never smiled too wide. Never frowned too long. She served food, cleaned surfaces, refilled machines. Wore her apron like armor and her silence like a second skin. Her ptinum hair was long. Her blue eyes a little too sharp for someone who supposedly grew up in a backwater zone. But no one questioned it. Not directly.

  They just watched.

  Because strange things happened around her.

  Machines stopped failing. Arguments lost momentum. People who walked in bitter left quiet, blinking at the sky like they'd forgotten why they were angry.

  It wasn't magic. It wasn't showy. It just was.

  And that made it worse.

  The first real rumor came from a trader. Older man, half-mechanical, who cimed the coffee fixed his chronic wrist calibration issue. Laughed about it, even.

  Until he came back two weeks ter, sober and pale, asking Maren what she'd done.

  She'd said, "Nothing."

  He’d nodded.

  And left.

  The second rumor was stranger.

  A child wandered in during a dust storm. No parents. No ID. Sat in a booth for six hours, silent. When Maren found her, the child looked her dead in the eye and said, "You're not from here. But the world likes you anyway."

  Then she left. Just walked out into the storm like it wasn’t there.

  A week ter, a monk stopped by. Didn’t order anything. Just sat, watching her clean.

  Before he left, he bowed low and whispered, "I don’t think you’re hiding. I think you’re waiting."

  Maren hadn’t looked up.

  He never came back.

  Outside the dome, things moved.

  Whispers reached spaceports. Talk of a woman who shouldn’t exist. A pce where the ws of entropy rexed. A name never spoken, only implied.

  And somewhere far from Ellira-9, in a temple built from bone and fme, someone began to listen.

  Not because they believed.

  But because they remembered.

  The one who refused to rule had settled again. And this time, the universe wouldn’t let her go so quietly.