Chapter 1: A Song Lost Among the Stars
The soft hum of Celeste Rayne’s starcruiser filled the cockpit as she leaned back in her pilot’s seat, feet propped up on the control panel. The holographic dashboard flickered with erratic readings, but she paid them no mind. After all, she’d been flying by sheer luck for the past two days, and luck had a way of running out at the worst possible moments.
She strummed her lumitharp absentmindedly, plucking out the melody of her latest song. The Ballad of a Cosmic Wanderer. It was half-finished, much like her current plan for survival. The universe was vast, and for all the worlds she had performed on, there were just as many where she was a nobody—a stowaway on her own fate, drifting wherever the next gig or the next malfunctioning spaceship took her.
A loud bang jolted her from her thoughts.
Red warning lights flared across the cockpit, and the ship lurched violently to one side. The engines sputtered, struggling against some unseen force, and before Celeste could so much as curse under her breath, the gravity stabilizers failed. The ship spiraled downward, caught in the gravitational pull of an unknown planet below.
“Of course,” she muttered, gripping the controls. “This is how it ends. Not in a grand finale, not on a stage in front of millions, but in a fiery crash on some backwater rock.”
The ship groaned as it tore through the atmosphere, the windshield ablaze with friction. Celeste wrestled with the controls, rerouting power from nonessential systems—like artificial gravity, because at this point, floating upside down seemed like the least of her worries.
A final impact sent her sprawling against the dashboard, the world around her spinning in a dizzying blur. Then—silence.
Celeste groaned and lifted her head. She was alive. That was a promising start. The ship? Less so. Smoke curled from the damaged control panel, and outside, through the cracked windshield, an unfamiliar landscape stretched out before her—rolling dunes of violet sand beneath a sky streaked with three suns.
“Great,” she muttered. “Guess I’ll have to add ‘crash survivor’ to my resume.”
She reached for her communicator, hoping to send a distress signal, but it was completely fried. Just as she was about to let out a groan of frustration, a shadow loomed over the windshield.
A figure stood outside—tall, broad-shouldered, and covered in oil-streaked work clothes. He wore a pair of tinted goggles pushed up onto his forehead, and in his hands, he held a peculiar wrench-like tool that glowed faintly at the edges.
Celeste squinted at him. “Please tell me you’re a rescue team and not an alien scavenger looking to sell my ship for parts.”
The man tilted his head. Then, in a voice as smooth as a well-tuned engine, he replied, “That depends. Are you willing to trade?”
And just like that, Celeste knew she had landed in the middle of something far more interesting than she’d bargained for.
