Ozymandias
The Sundering Dawn – Act IV: The Last Turn of Calladene
Introduction
The crystalline corridor has opened at last, a glassy throat cut through folded space. One by one—or in spear-headed formation—fleets plunge down its prismatic length, shedding every familiar star until the sky turns entirely black. Then the machine-world appears: a planet-sized gear plate whose broken teeth scrape sparks against the void. Ring-cities drift in slow ruin, and down every orbital trench pour silver cascades of Starweirds like water fleeing a burst dam. Calladene is awake, misaligned, and moments from tearing itself—and the Galaxy—into unrecognizable strata.
As ships establish tenuous orbits, ground parties descend through chasms that once housed Celestial gardens. Every surface hums with impossible mathematics. Time dilates; gravity curls sideways; voices echo seconds ahead of themselves. The three recovered Keys—Blood, Echo, Axis—hang heavy on belts or in cargo vaults, each one vibrating to the stutter of the core. Whatever happens next will decide whether those Keys heal the fracture or hammer it wider.
No central commander issues orders here. Calladene is too vast, the crisis too immediate. Instead, objectives blossom like fractures along the machine’s skin; choose one, or forge your own, and carve your legend in the moments before the Galaxy’s clock breaks for good.
Objective 1 – Hunt the Alpha Starweird
At the base of the primary power conduit—an atrium of shattered light pillars—the Alpha Starweird coils around the world-heart, siphoning energy in gargantuan breaths. Its psychic scream blank-spots sensors and scrambles Force perception, making every ally feel like a threat and every corridor feel identical to the last. Strike teams must stalk through concentric maintenance chambers where lesser Starweirds nest in flickering stasis fields, each burst of motion sending ripples through the Alpha’s awareness.
Three environmental hazards complicate the hunt: first, gravitic surges hurl combatants across chambers without warning; second, electrical discharges arc from exposed Celestial conduits, ionizing metal and flesh alike; third, reflections in coolant pools show future versions of the hunters—some victorious, some dead—testing morale and resolve. Interaction with these visions can grant cryptic warnings…or self-fulfilling nightmares.
Success means slaying or subduing the Alpha, instantly dulling the hive-scream that whips Starweird swarms into frenzy across orbit. Failure leaves the creature free to rip wider tears in real-space, spawning fresh horrors in every lane that still holds. How you end it—lightsaber through the core, alchemic binding, desperate bargain—is entirely up to the hunters.
Objective 2 – Re-Align the World-Gear
Deep within Calladene’s equatorial trench lies the Central Gear Cradle, a canyon of interlocking cogs big enough to swallow Star Destroyers whole. Each cog is frozen a degree off true, hemorrhaging spacetime turbulence into surrounding sectors. Engineers, slicers, Wayseekers, and field mystics must navigate catwalks suspended over reality-shearing teeth, manually engaging colossal clutch locks or rewriting Celestial code-glyphs to nudge the gear back to its intended twenty-nine-degree, thirteen-minute alignment.
The cradle is unguarded by living foes—but plagued by physics gone feral. Time pockets stall a blaster bolt mid-flight; inertia flips at odd intervals, sending tools tumbling upward; spoken language fractures, trading syllables with conversations occurring ten minutes ago or ten minutes hence. Progress demands improvisation: zero-G welding, Force-powered telekinesis, or jury-rigged tractor arrays cannibalized from crashed fighters.
If the gear realigns, hyperspace fractures across the Galaxy knit into relative stability, buying generations of breathing room. Mishandle the calibration and the cradle seizes, grinding down until the entire machine locks—potentially petrifying a slice of the Galaxy in timeless stasis or tearing new wounds no fleet can cross. Choose your method; live with the consequences.
Objective 3 – The Celestial Archive
Hidden beneath a labyrinth of lightless tunnels is an Archive Core: perfect crystal pillars storing millennia of Celestial design logs, star-maps predating the current cosmos, and perhaps the original directive that birthed Calladene. Reaching it requires bypassing recursive doorways that reset to earlier architectural states every time a new mind enters. Literature, code, and the Force itself become keys: quote a passage from forgotten astrogation mythos, input prime-factor equations, or meditate until the doorway “accepts” your state of balance.
Inside, the Archive does not attack; it interrogates. Visitors face holographic projections of possible tomorrows: utopias where lanes flow freely under caretaker fleets, dystopias where powers exploit an obedient gear to redraw borders nightly. Characters can copy data, erase it, or attempt to upload their own doctrines. Every alteration reverberates across crystal stacks, visible as shifting auroras above the machine-world—signals to every other objective that the future is being edited in real time.
Walk out with knowledge enough to guide a reborn Galaxy, secrets to dominate post-crisis politics, or leave nothing standing so that no emperor, council, or order can weaponize the past. The Archive will not stop you; only your own faction’s philosophy—and rival archivists—stand in the way.
