~ ~ ~Chains of Starlight~ ~ ~

Chapter Four: Misfire

"Even a cage made of stars is still a cage."

Not because it was peaceful—but because it was curated. Everything in the Vaulronian palace had been designed to pacify. To erase the sharp edges of captivity. There was no screaming here, no chain rattle, no blood. Just symphonic air currents, velvet corridors, and soft-spoken servants who never blinked.

She'd stopped counting days.

There was no sun to track—only the rhythm of golden light dimming into violet dusk, and the meals that appeared without faces. Always warm. Always different. Never poisoned. Never human.

And yet she didn't eat like a guest.

She ate like a survivor.

Not out of surrender—but because it had become a game. Nadyr wanted her calm. She would give him composed defiance.

She explored every inch of her suite, then the gardens beyond it. There were no birds. Just glowing, petal-laced flora that pulsed with slow breath-like rhythm, as if the vines themselves were waiting. When she passed too close, they retreated.

Just like everything else in this damn place.

The guards never spoke. The Vraek wore obsidian armor so fused to their skin it pulsed with their heartbeats. Their helms bore no eye slits—just that eerie reflective surface that always seemed to find her first.

She named one of them Stalker, just to amuse herself. He was always at the end of the corridor when she turned.

In her quieter moments, Kyla wrote in the journal.

It had been left without explanation beside her food tray. A thin book, leather-textured, with pages like pressed silk. On the first page: a diagram of her wing. A star-shaped sigil she hadn't recognized. The second page bore a sketch of Nadyr with a word written above it in bold, curling ink:

Vaulron.

She didn't know who had left it—servant, rebel, scientist—but it was a lifeline. She wrote notes obsessively. Drew even—patterns she seen Nadyr use on consoles.

Observations:

- Fruit in morning meals change color if cut.

- The glowing vines in the garden retract when whistled to.

- Three guards per shift. Same pattern.

- Tribunal noble with gray-scaled face asked me to "join him for aesthetic stimulation." I haven't seen him since.

- Vaulron crest. Points match pattern of perimeter drones.

- She drew her sister's name across the next page. Mira Johnson. Over and over, like a prayer she didn't want Nadyr to hear.

- She traced the same star-shaped sigil from the wing sketch onto a spare page. She'd seen something like it etched into the control panel outside the locked data tower. Coincidence? She doubted it.

The translator chip finished its calibration within the second cycle, and with it came a new kind of prison: understanding. Suddenly, she could comprehend the soft voices that echoed through the hallways, the mechanical chimes of the lifts, even the conversations of guards outside her chamber.

Nadyr rarely visited. But when he did, he stayed long enough to observe her—never sitting, never close, just watching with a mind that never blinked.

It was easier when he wasn't there.

She began to test the limits.

The guards never stopped her from exploring, not inside the private wing. She quickly learned there were places they would block—like the exterior launch bays, and the upper data towers. But most of the wing belonged to her now.