illphated
Elara adjusted the lens on her grandfather’s brass telescope, the cool metal a familiar comfort under her fingertips. On Xylos, nights were long and the sky was a spectacle. The twin moons, Phos and Deimos, bathed the rolling hills in a silvery light, but her focus was on the deep, velvet blackness beyond. For weeks, a smudge of violet and gold had been growing in the Serpent’s Coil nebula. It was beautiful, impossible, and utterly wrong. No known celestial event could account for its rapid bloom.
Her grandfather had been the town’s stargazer, a man who taught her to read the sky like a map. He’d left her his charts, his telescope, and his insatiable curiosity. That curiosity gnawed at her now. The official explanation from the Aethel Science Council—the governing body on the system’s central planet, whose advanced wisdom trickled down to the other worlds—spoke of “interstellar dust interacting with a previously dormant star.” It was a plausible, elegant lie.
Elara knew it was a lie because she had found her grandfather’s hidden journal. Tucked away in a false bottom of his telescope case, the leather-bound book was filled with frantic script and calculations that went far beyond charting constellations. He wrote of anomalies, of minute, impossibly synchronized shifts in the positions of “fixed” stars. He theorized about a “Great Deception,” a lie so vast it was unimaginable. His final entry was a single, chilling question: “What if the sky is moving with us?”
Driven by his last words, Elara had built a device based on his schematics—a resonance emitter tuned to a frequency he believed could pierce the veil. One night, with her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs, she pointed the emitter at the sky and flipped the switch.
For a moment, there was nothing but the familiar hum of the device. Then, the stars flickered.
It was just for a second, but it was enough. The pinpricks of light wavered, and in their place, she saw a faint, shimmering grid, a web of impossibly perfect lines that stretched across the entire dome of the sky. It was a cage. A beautiful, impossibly large cage. And they were inside it.
A voice, calm and ancient, echoed not in her ears, but directly in her mind. “Curiosity is a dangerous, precious thing, child of Xylos.”
A figure shimmered into existence beside her telescope, a tall, slender being clad in robes that seemed woven from light itself. It was a Pilot, one of the legendary inhabitants of Aethel, the beings who had conquered disease, aging, and scarcity, and now guided the lesser civilizations of their solar system.
“The Great Deception, as you call it, is a kindness,” the Pilot continued, its voice resonating with a weary sadness. “Our home world achieved technological singularity millennia ago. When we learned to harness the energy of our star, we faced a choice: leave our neighbors behind to evolve on their own, or take them with us.”
He gestured to the sky. “This solar system—our ‘Vessel’—is traveling the cosmos. We have journeyed through galaxies, witnessed the birth and death of stars, and skirted the edges of black holes. We are explorers on the grandest scale imaginable.”
Elara stared, her mind struggling to grasp the enormity of it. Her world, her moons, the gas giants with their swirling storms, the sun itself—all were passengers on an interstellar ark. Every sunrise, every season, every celestial event she’d ever known had occurred while hurtling through the void at unimaginable speeds.
“Why?” she whispered. “Why hide it?”
“Because your people are not ready,” the Pilot said gently. “Neither are the sentient ocean dwellers of Hydros, nor the moon-miners of Ganymede. The knowledge that your entire existence is a curated journey, that your world is a cosmic nursery shielded from the true, terrifying emptiness of the universe… it would break you. Your religions, your science, your societies would crumble into chaos. We protect you from a truth you are not yet equipped to handle.”
Elara looked from the ancient being to her grandfather’s telescope, then to the sky that was no longer just a sky. He was right, of course. Panic, fear, madness—that would be the result. But it was also a lie. A cage was still a cage, no matter how gilded.
“We have a right to know,” she said, her voice trembling but firm.
The Pilot gave a slow, somber nod. “One day, you will. When your science looks past the sky and begins to question the very fabric of reality, we will be waiting. Your grandfather was close. You, Elara, are closer. Your actions tonight have hastened that timetable.”
He began to fade, the light of his form dissolving into the cool night air. “We will be watching. Show us you are ready. The universe is a vast and wondrous place. We hope, one day, you will be able to see it with your own eyes, and not just through the shell of our Vessel.”
He was gone. Elara was alone again, the violet and gold nebula—a cosmic cloud they were passing by—glowing brighter than ever. The deception was intact, her secret safe. But now, when she looked up at the stars, she didn’t see a map of home. She saw the bars of her cage, and beyond them, an infinite, terrifying, and beautiful freedom she was determined her people would one day claim.
