HaShalah Monastic Station
Seraphic Order Space
A few days ago

The star seemed sick. Anat had thought so many times, but, as she watched it out there now, distant and greenish orange, sending out its cocktail of exotic radiations, she wondered why it would not be so. Each star had a birth and a death assigned to it, like all living things, so why couldn't it suffer illness in between?

The Architects had called this star HaMuz'hav, the golden one, and it had, at one time, held some great significance in their ancient empire. Though much was forgotten when the Architects left, the memory of HaMuz'hav was strong amongst the Possessions, such that great effort was expended to extend their territory out towards it. HaShalah, they called it. The stretching out. And when they finally reached HaMuz'hav, and constructed this orbital monastery? What then? Anat did not know, though she had been there most of her life, thirteen decades of it.

Still, she and the other ascetics who called HaShalah home had made the most of it. They meditated on the star, prayed to the Architects and sought the wisdom of the universe. HaShalah was equipped with some of the Architect's most advanced monitoring equipment, after all, and even if they only understood less than half of the results it displayed and learned nothing more about the strange, sickly star, still they had learned a great deal about other things. Of course, the universe had only so many secrets and one could get bored of just listening.

She watched HaMuz'hav twinkling in the distance and sighed, before turning away and returning to her station. It was her watch on the machine and though it had long since become tedious, still, it was her sacred duty before the Architects and in the name of the Order. She was about to resume her seat when she noticed a light blinking on the machine unlike any she had seen before. Tentatively she reached out and touched it and immediately the machine threw up a holoprojection of an object travelling through space in the vicinity of HaMuz'hav. A second projection threw up lines of data which Anat tried to absorb, though it moved far quicker than she could read it and her ancient Iv'riyt was never all that good. Something about a signal? Another light flashed, then and Anat pressed it reactively, unthinking. A garbled message in some language she did not understand came through the machine's hidden speakers, but, just as quickly, the words became ancient Iv'riyt and Anat began to understand a little. Just a little.

When the message was over, Anat knew what she had to do and though she knew that the thought of leaving HaShalah ought to have felt like a betrayal of her vows, still, she could not quite suppress a tiny smile.