Chapter Text
We all know how this story begins:
A colony ship bound for the Tau Ceti system, a mere eleven light-years from our own Sol, makes the jump into the Void with tens of thousands of souls on-board. Something goes wrong. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, but it does.
Every adult aboard succumbs to madness. Some go immediately, others fight it, and eventually lose. Only the children are left to drift in their broken ship through inverted space. We don’t know for how long; time ceased to have all meaning when we stopped growing.
We didn’t notice when our broken ship transitioned back into normal space, just past the rings of Saturn. We didn't notice the white emptiness of the Void turn back into the darkest pitch. We didn't notice the stars turn back into lights again, numerous candles lit in the dark.
But we did notice when unfamiliar, grown up faces, showed up in the corridors of our ship. We fought them, thinking that somehow we had missed this threat. Many of them died. Many more got hurt.
But they weren’t Void poisoned.
What we didn’t realize until much later, is that we were.