My Infinite System.

The five moons had shifted in their slow dance across the sky when Alistair spoke again. The grief for Isabella was a fresh, quiet wound between them, but it had forged a new determination in Lucy’s eyes. The time for tears was over. Now, it was time to understand.

”Again,” Alistair said, his voice calm. ”But this time, don’t just invite the light. Listen for its opposite, too.”

Lucy stood, her feet planted firmly in the pale dust. She closed her eyes, reaching out with that new, fragile sense. She found the warm, gentle stream of light from the white moon easily now. But beneath it, she felt something else—a cool, deep stillness from the shadowed side of a rock, an absence of energy that was just as real.

”Energy isn’t just light and heat,” Alistair explained, walking a slow circle around her. ”It’s vibration. It’s magnetism. It’s the pull of gravity and the silence between stars. To persuade it, you must know all its faces.”

Lucy nodded, her brow furrowed in concentration. She tried to hold both sensations at once—the warmth and the cool stillness. It was like trying to pat her head and rub her stomach; her focus splintered, and both sensations faded.

”It’s too much,” she grunted, dropping her hands in frustration.

”It is,” Alistair agreed, not unkindly. ”For now. Your mind is a human mind, trained for a single world, a single sun. It will take time to stretch.” He stopped in front of her. ”But your blood remembers. It remembers a time when our people didn’t just listen to the universe’s song. We composed it.”

Lucy looked at him, her interest piqued. ”Our people? The... Ancients?”

A shadow passed over Alistair’s face, old and weary. ”That’s what the younger races call us now. A name for a dead civilization. Once, we had another name. We were the Aethel. It means ’of the source’.”

He gestured for her to sit on the smooth rock he’d occupied earlier. He sat on the ground opposite her, like a storyteller at a campfire.

”Imagine it, Lucy. A race born not just with power, but with an innate understanding of the fundamental forces of reality. We didn’t build cities; we persuaded stone to rise and form them. We didn’t fly ships; we asked the fabric of space to carry us. For a time, we were the architects of this galaxy. We helped life flourish on a thousand worlds. We were stewards.”

He picked up a handful of dust and let it trickle through his fingers. ”But even the strongest tree can be felled if every other tree in the forest leans against it. Our power... it inspired awe at first. Then envy. Then fear.”

”Why?” Lucy asked, captivated. ”If you were helping?”

”Because our ability is unique. It cannot be copied, only inherited. The other races, with all their technology and their own fledgling magics, could never do what we did. They saw a ceiling they could never break through. And they decided that if they couldn’t reach it, they would shatter it.”

His silver eyes grew distant, looking into a past she couldn’t imagine. ”They called it the Culling. A united front of every major species, from the tech-lords of Cygnus to the psionic hive-minds of the Lyra Nebula. They claimed we were a danger to the natural order. That we played at being gods.”

He gave a bitter, hollow laugh. ”They were the ones playing god that day. They used weapons that scarred reality itself. They didn’t just kill us. They tried to erase our legacy, our history, the very echo of our existence from the cosmos. Our great cities were unmade. Our libraries, which held the memories of stars, were turned to ash.”

Lucy listened, her heart pounding. It was a history of genocide on a cosmic scale.

”We were shattered,” Alistair whispered. ”Those of us who survived went into hiding, scattering to the forgotten corners of the universe. We buried our power, lived as simply as we could, and prayed the hunters would never find us.” He looked at her, his gaze intense.

The weight of it settled on Lucy. It wasn’t just about her father anymore. It was about an entire people, hunted to the brink of extinction.

”So... I’m not just part... alien,” she said slowly. ”I’m one of the last of a dead race.”

”You are a spark,” Alistair corrected, his voice firm. ”A spark they thought they had smothered. Your very existence is an act of defiance.” He leaned forward. ”And now you understand why you must learn. This isn’t just about self-defense. It is about survival. Our survival.”

He stood and offered her his hand again. ”Now. Again. Feel the light. Feel the stillness. Don’t try to hold them both. Just let them flow through you, one after the other. Be the conduit, not the container.”

Nodding, her mind reeling but her purpose clearer than ever, Lucy stood. She closed her eyes. This time, she didn’t fight the complexity. She acknowledged the warm light, let it fill her senses, then released it and reached for the deep, cool shadow. Back and forth. Like breathing.

The world around her began to change. She could feel the magnetic pull of the planet’s core, a deep, resonant hum. She felt the faint solar wind from a distant star, a whisper against her skin. It was overwhelming, a symphony of forces, but she stopped trying to play every instrument. She just listened to the music.

When she opened her eyes, her palm was not holding a single orb of light. Instead, a faint, shimmering aura surrounded her hand, a barely-visible field where light and shadow seemed to dance and intertwine.

It was unstable, flickering in and out of existence, but it was there.

Alistair’s smile was one of deep, profound satisfaction. ”There. You see? You are not just learning a trick. You are remembering a birthright.”

He looked up at the strange, neon sky, his expression hardening. ”They think we are a relic. A memory. They are wrong. We are embers, Lucy. And it only takes a single ember to start a wildfire.”

Lucy looked at her hand, at the shimmering field of energy she had coaxed into being. She wasn’t just Lucy Black. She was Lucy, of the Aethel. A spark. An ember.

And she was ready to burn.