Empyrean Iris: 3-106 Vector (by Charlie Star)
FYI, this is a story COLLECTION. Lots of standalones technically. So, you can basically start to read at any chapter, no pre-read of the other chapters needed technically (other than maybe getting better descriptions of characters than: Adam Vir=human, Krill=antlike alien, Sunny=tall alien, Conn=telepathic alien). The numbers are (mostly) only for organization of posts and continuity.
OC Written by Charlie Star/starrfallknightrise,
Checked, proofread, typed up and then posted here by me.
Further proofreading and language check for some chapters by u/Finbar9800 u/BakeGullible9975 u/Didnotseemecomein and u/medium_jock
Future Lore and fact check done by me.
YIKES!
Want to find a specific one, see the whole list or check fanart?
Here is the link to the master-post.
He knelt low in the grass, brushing his fingers through the green, overhead the sky and clouds moved like they should, trundling across the blue expanse as they shrunk towards the horizon.
It was all an illusion, but it seemed so... so real, it felt real and smelled real. Looking at the fake image of his mother, looking as she did in old family pictures, he could see the light diffusing through her skin, a perfect facsimile of the real thing captured in the past.
But why here?
Was there a reason the cube had taken him here?
Conn stood next to him, staring out across the projected world frowning, probably wishing there were more people than Adam here, so that he could invade their minds.
Adam ignored him for the most part.
The sky overhead began to darken.
He expected Martha to pick up her children and start heading home, but the children continued to play oblivious to the approaching dark, and Martha, just didn't move from her spot. It wasn't THAT odd, not really, not until the darkness increased, and no light began flickering on, and yet the children were still playing.
It was only then he noticed how the children were playing, but... somehow even that seemed wrong, repeating the same actions repeatedly, their voices slowly fading, until they played, but made no noise.
He backed away into the grass, the hair rising on the back of his arms.
His instincts were telling him something was wrong.
MASSIVELY wrong.
"Adam."
He turned to look at Conn who was facing in the other direction.
This time he didn't ignore Conn's unease, which was so powerful he could feel it seeping through his telepathic communication,
"What do you feel?"
He asked softly.
"It isn't empty anymore."
Conn said softly, and the phrase sent a shiver up Adam's back as he stood.
And as he stood there, he saw something else stand up.
The shadow of his mother sitting in the darkness.
It shouldn't' have bothered him as much as it did, but there was something about the way she moved that made his skin crawl. He turned to look at her, adjusting the setting on his mechanical eye, and flicking on the small, but powerful green bulb in the back.
Sometime between Adam choosing to turn on the light and the light coming on, she had moved, impossibly fast.
Light spilled out of his eye, bathing the park in a green haze.
And her twisted face…
He screamed in shock and leapt back as Martha stepped forward jerkily, her arms opened out to the sides as if expecting a hug. But the issue was, she had no eyes, they had been replaced with jutting tusks of bone which curved from her eye sockets.
A red glow emanated from her mouth as she spoke.
"Dangerous of you to come here darling, for the void is ours."
Adam stepped back
It was his mother's voice, but not the way she usually spoke.
His stomach churned, and he stepped back, running into Conn who was facing in the other direction,
"Adam...”
Martha jolted forward.
Adam reached into his jacket, and with a sharp snap, he had a spear in his hand, internally thanking Sunny for all the gifts of concealable weapons that she had given him, and insisted that he carry. He Brandished the spear with a steady hand despite his trembling lips,
"Stay back!”
Martha smirked.
"I wonder, could you stab your own mother, even knowing it isn't her?"
She stepped closer.
Adam gritted his teeth,
"Take one more step and you're going to find out the hard way."
She just grinned, twisting his mother's face into an expression so... so vile it didn't even look like her anymore. Martha would never have made a face that looked like that.
Adam had seen his mother angry, scared, and sad. On occasion he had even seen a bit of her vindictive or hateful side, which even she was not eager to admit she had.
But even during those times, he had never experienced such a sense of... unease and disgust as he did when that expression crossed her face.
Pure malice.
He tightened his grip on the spear. As long as the THING wearing his mother's face kept using her body like that, then he wasn't going to have any issue stabbing her through the throat, architect forgive him.
"It won't touch you, it can't."
Adam turned to look over his shoulder while still keeping his mechanical eye on Martha,
"Conn?"
"It’s an illusion just like everything else... everyone else."
Adam watched in shock and rising chills as Conn motioned to the park around them which was now full of people standing and staring at them. A red glow rose around them, coming from everywhere and nowhere, accompanied by a sort of glowing red haze. All of them had protruding tusks of bone jutting from their heads, some from their mouths, some from their eyes, some from their ears, some punctured straight through skin.
Standing just to his left, little 12 year old Maya stood, a tusk of bone choking her voice, spilling out of her mouth like a tongue, and in her arms she held... a very frightened looking child, the only child that didn't appear affected by the evil… Thing.
He was scared, whimpering and struggling in her arms, pudgy little hands pushing against her as he tried to climb out of her arms, but her grip was too strong.
The fear on his own face, on his toddler face, stirred something deep inside him.
Conn gripped him by the arm,
"Adam don't, he isn't real."
Adam watched himself struggle, beginning to cry in his sister's arms, though the fake Maya never stopped looking at him. Adam was forced to look away, turning his back on his mother and Maya, head echoing with the sound of his own weeping as the phantom of his child's self-sobbed with fear and pain.
"What do you want!?”
He demanded, shouting out into the darkness.
There was no answer at first, but Conn continued to stare in the same direction, and Adam followed his lead. All around them the phantoms stepped closer, hemming them in in a small circle, staring and nothing more.
"What do you WANT?!?"
Adam demanded again
"You are in no place to make demands!"
Adam flinched back in surprise. He had been yelling for his own comfort more than anything else, and had not expected to receive an answer. But this voice was real, he could tell it was by the way it echoed around him, somehow feeling more, corporeal than anything else had. He glanced towards Conn, and inside his head he received an answer.
"Yes. Someone else is suddenly here."
Adam turned his head towards the voice,
"Show your face!”
"Still making demands, filthy maggot?”
He recognized that... whoever it was was not speaking English, though it took him a minute for his frazzled mind to determine what he was hearing.
It was…
Drev!?!
It was with that thought that he saw the shape appear in the darkness. She didn't just walk from the darkness, but it was as if she had stepped out of the darkness, or more aptly, the darkness had flowed and coalesced into her silhouette. She was tall, almost eleven feet in height, and she stood with all the power of a general.
Adam knew her without even knowing her.
With all the stories Sunny had told about her, he didn't need to have met her to know her.
"Kazna."
He hissed
She did not laugh, or chuckle sinisterly or anything of the sort.
She simply stepped from the darkness and into his beam of green light, its eerie light causing shadows high on her face, similar to when telling scary stories, and holding the flashlight under your chin,
"You made a mistake in coming here."
She repeated.
"Are you real?"
He asked.
She ignored him,
"You have walked into a void."
She raised her hands and motioned to everything around them,
"Everything you see here is artificial, simply an illusion to trick your mind into thinking it sees something that it does not, a pocket dimension if you will. That seems like something you might understand."
He gritted his teeth and raised his spear. He had defeated her before; he could defeat her once again.
"By way of what it is, this pocket dimension was created in our domain... The void, the blackness, and we have complete control over it regardless of what the Makers might like to think."
"So you're an illusion?”
She sneered at him, her eyes flaring gold.
Adam stepped back.
Drev eyes didn't glow. Her sneer turned into a smirk,
"Yes, as you noticed "I" am real, but I am the only thing here that is."
"Lanus."
Conn whispered inside his head.
Adam understood.
He straightened his back shaking his head at her,
"What have you done Kazna?"
She tilted her head at him.
"If you understand what is going on, you have to know that Legion is using you. You have to know that this life was just the first step... what about Lanus?”
She snarled,
"Don't you dare speak his name!"
"I've met him Kanza, alive and well into his next life."
He jabbed a finger at her,
"By aligning yourself with the Legion you are condemning yourself to never seeing him again... I knew he was already disappointed in you, but think of what this would do to him."
And then she was in his face, towering over him, leaning down to snarl. Words had left her.
"He's with the makers, and you could be too, but instead you chose… this."
"Lies!"
"I've seen him!"
He retorted.
In the back of his head, Conn kept up a steady stream of information, relaying her thoughts to him in real time quickly going through her memories as he tried to figure out what had transpired, finding all the information he could.
This was the real Kanza given power by the Legion to act as their vessel, or so she had been told.
Adam knew better though.
He had watched enough fantasy and science fiction movies to know that she was simply being used as a vessel for something bigger, and when they were done with her, they would just discard her like a pair of dirty socks worn too long.
He tried for a different tac, dropping his voice and holding his hands out palms up. Despite all of the instincts inside him, he forced down the confrontation and did his best to sound concerned, to forget his grudge towards her for just a moment.
It was a feat almost impossible.
Perhaps if he had been her son, the one to have experienced all of the horrors perpetrated upon Sunny, he might have been able to forgive but when he thought about what she had to go through under the hand of this woman, all the emotional and psychological abuse, the physical shaming, starvation, and worse... well he almost couldn't.
Adam hoped he was a good person, really tried, but looking Kazna in the eye, it took everything he had not to try and choke her to death on the spot, and it would take the power of the Architect himself to help him do anything more than what he was attempting now.
"Please Kazna, I don't want to fight you... I don't even want to argue. I am trying to warn you, they are just using you, and when they are done with you they will discard you."
He looked back towards Conn urging him to keep up his commentary, to see if his words were taking effect,
"Please there is still time. Quit this now and I promise you will see Lanus, you could do some good for your children, Kanan, Chalan, even for Dzara."
Kazna paused looking almost confused.
Adam forgot.
"Dzara? I know no one by that name."
Adam held out a hand,
"That's because... Because she was one of the Kit's you couldn't throw back into the fire. You left her in the valley and they found her, they raised her. She's alive and well, and I swear all you have to do is stop this, you can see your children again, mend everything that happened, see Lanus again."
He felt bad for promising those things to her. None of her children wanted to see her, and he would never bring Kazna to meet them without being instructed to, but Kazna didn't have to know that. Maybe she COULD see Lanus again though. Maybe after her death, the makers could fix whatever it was that went wrong with her in the first place.
Maybe Sunny could finally get an apology.
He watched Kazna's face slack with his words. Inside his head he could hear Conn, and through him he could hear Kazna fighting inside herself. It surprised him to see that there was... something left, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the Drev she had once been.
Proud, but optimistic, brutal but not unfair.
Just as he was about close to understanding her, Conn was violently shut out.
Shadows flowed up around her and her eyes sparked gold again,
"I WILL see Lanus again!”
She hissed,
”And THEY will go into the fire where they belong!"
Adam stepped back as Kazna reached down, gripping him by the throat and lifting him into the air.
She was incredibly strong.
A dark mirror of what she had been in her youth, nothing like the defeated Drev he had seen on the floor of her prison sell.
He saw no evidence of injury, the severed tendons on the back of her feet, completely repaired. He choked and grimaced, pulling at her hand as his windpipe struggled to stay open.
Her eyes narrowed at him,
"I would love to kill you, but you still have a purpose to serve."
She threw him to the ground and he rolled, holding onto his neck while gasping,
"Thanks to you the way has already been set."
She said, and a hint of smugness crept into her voice, as if she was suddenly enjoying this.
He crawled to his hands and knees hand around his throat,
"I would NEVER work for you and your filth."
"No?"
A wicked expression crossed her face again, and suddenly he wasn't so sure.
"My dear stupid human, you have already set the path. You have already done more than we could have ever asked of you."
She knelt in front of him, and this time it was her turn to weasel her way into his head,
"Let’s see if I can find a good analogy. Ah... Like a honeybee, you have those on your planet don't you?”
"Where is this going?”
"Sit and listen, and I'll tell you. honeybees go out from their hives to collect what they need to make honey. When they sit inside a flower, pollen collets on their bodies and legs, and they spread it wherever they go, to other flowers and then eventually back to the hive."
"Cute. Really a very cute analogy."
"I'm not finished."
”…”
"You."
She said, tapping his chest,
"Are a honeybee, except in this instance the pollen is “the Specimen”, that's what you call it isn't it? And instead of flowers they are planets. So really what I am saying is, you are less of a honeybee and more like a spreading vector."
Adam's heart pounded.
"An infected vector, spreading his disease wherever he goes. The Celzex home world, Anin, Irus, and of course, Earth."
Adam was shaking his head, but he already knew it was right.
"You were the first person to come in contact with the specimen, you are the REASON they found you, all of this is your fault."
She leaned in close,
"And now that we are done with you, we can let the infection have you, just like your little friend... Connor? Was that his name. The crazy jabbering one... Space is biig space is space and all, that dumb jabbering stuff."
Adam felt as if he was about to throw up.
All of a sudden, his skin felt very hot.
He began to itch all over.
"A pity… For you it won't be so easy as all the others. Your body has had time to get used to the Specimen, so it will probably fight it. I can only imagine what horrible way you're going to die before it takes you over slowly and we harvest your anima."
She laughed,
"Goodbye Adam, this will likely be the last time I see you alive. As a last tip: try to die fast, the outcome will be same now anyway, but the longer it takes to get there the more you will suffer."
And then the world around him imploded, and he went spinning tonto blackness.
Want to find a specific one, see the whole list or check fanart?
Here is the link to the master-post.
Thanks for reading! As you saw in the title, this is a cross posted story in its original form written by starrfallknightrise and I am just proofreading and improving some parts, as well as structuring the story for you guys, if you are interested and want to read ahead, the original story-collection can be found on tumblr or wattpad to read for free. (link above this text under "OC:..." ) It is the Empyrean Iris story collection by starfallknightrise. Also, if you want to know more about the story collection i made an intro post about it, so feel free to check that out to see what other great characters to look forward to! (Link also above this text). I have no affiliations to the author; just thought I’d share some of the great stories you might enjoy a lot!
Obviously, I have Charlie’s permission to post this.
Posted Aug 26, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC