Cosmic Conversations

Episode One: Touch Me and Die

I lost my daughter.

Let’s begin there, since apparently the universe enjoys skipping the soft opening and throwing women directly into the fire.

I lost Sacred to a system that wore white uniforms, spoke in calm voices, and handed me a death certificate with condolences so polished they nearly glittered.

They told me she was gone.

They told me there was nothing left to investigate.

They told me grief was a private matter, and I was an important woman with an important job and a city to protect.

Translation?

Sit down. Be pretty. Stop asking questions.

Cute.

I tried.

For a while.

I wore the black dresses. I attended the memorial. I accepted the flowers from people who had never held my child while she slept. I smiled for the cameras. I went back to my work beneath Neo Atlantica—the city of gold towers, surveillance skies, and a government so obsessed with “harmony” it could not recognize a scream unless it came with proper paperwork.

I became excellent at looking composed.

I became excellent at swallowing pain until it turned into something sharp enough to live beside.

But grief does not leave.

It learns your schedule.

It sits beside you in meetings.

It follows you into your bed.

It watches you stare at your reflection and wonder who the hell that woman is—the one with the perfect hair, the expensive coat, the haunted eyes, and the whole city calling her brilliant while she is quietly dying inside.

And then, one day, the system said my daughter’s name.

Sacred Vael.

Status: Active.

So, yes.

I am currently having an emotional emergency.

And no, I will not be handling it quietly.

Because if my daughter is alive, then somebody lied.

Actually, everybody lied.

And I have met enough powerful men in beautifully tailored clothing to know that when they say they were “protecting” you, it usually means they were protecting the version of the truth that benefited them most.

That brings me to Isaac.

Isaac was the love of my life before the world became a conspiracy.

He was home before I remembered I was allowed to want one.

Before the Veil. Before the Council. Before I started waking up with blood on my hands and memories missing from my head as somebody had reached into my life and deleted the best parts.

Isaac loved me before I became a problem to solve.

He loved me when I was tired, sarcastic, broke in spirit, and one bad day away from telling an Atlantean Council member exactly where they could place their ceremonial authority badge.

He knew the woman underneath the titles.

The woman who laughed too loudly.

The woman who hated being told what to do.

The woman who could take apart a neural system, fix a solar grid, and still burn dinner because she got distracted proving a point.

He knew Sacred before she became a ghost in my chest.

And losing him?

That was not one clean heartbreak.

It was a thousand little betrayals.

The kind where you wake up one morning and realize you are technically alive, but your soul has packed a bag and moved into the mountains without leaving a forwarding address.

Then there is I.O. Kaereth.

Lord help me.

No—actually, do not help me. I am beginning to think the universe sent him specifically to test my patience, my moral compass, and every single sensible thought I have ever had.

I.O. is the kind of man women are warned about in old stories.

The kind of man who walks into a room and the room forgets how to breathe.

Black coat. Red eyes. A voice low enough to make poor decisions sound like a spiritual practice.

He looks at me like he remembers things I have never lived.

Like he knows every version of me.

Like he has already watched me die and is furious I survived.

And the problem with I.O. is not that he is dangerous.

The problem is that he knows he is dangerous and still stands too close.

He has secrets folded into secrets. He speaks in half-truths, watches me like I am the last star in a dying sky, and says things like, “You were never supposed to remember,” as though that is not the kind of sentence that deserves a slap and a full investigation.

I do not trust him.

I do not trust the heat that rises in my body when his hand brushes mine.

I do not trust the way my pulse betrays me when he says my name.

And I definitely do not trust the fact that, under the right circumstances, I might kiss him just to make him stop talking.

That is not romance.

That is a hostile workplace environment with cheekbones.

Azrakh Sol’Veyr is different.

Azrakh does not try to charm a room.

He does not need to.

He enters, and the room remembers fear.

Dragon blood. Emerald eyes. Gold beneath his skin. Shoulders built like he could carry an empire on them and be mildly annoyed by the inconvenience.

He calls me Lost Daughter.

I call him a problem with a sword.

He looks at me with respect first.

That is somehow more dangerous than desire.

Because desire can be survived.

Respect?

Respect makes you wonder what it would feel like to stand beside someone who does not need to shrink you in order to feel powerful.

Azrakh sees the fight in me and does not try to extinguish it.

He just steps beside it.

Like he would burn the whole world down before he let anyone put me in a cage.

Touch me and die is not a threat with him.

It is a business policy.

Then there is Elias.

Beautiful, polished, tragic Elias.

The prince with ice-blue eyes and a future already written by people who have never had to live inside it.

He is married.

I know.

Do not start.

I have enough going on without falling into emotional danger with a crown prince who looks like sin in a black suit and dares to be kind when I am trying very hard to hate him.

Elias represents a choice.

A future.

A chance to change the system from inside the palace instead of burning it down from the streets.

But I am beginning to understand something terrible about myself.

I have never been very good at choosing the safe door.

Maybe because safety has always come with locks.

Maybe because every man in my life has a secret, every government has a body count, and every time I try to behave, the Veil whispers my name like it is calling me back to something older than fear.

So here is my truth.

I do not know who I will be when this is over.

I do not know which man will stand beside me when the sky finally breaks.

I do not know whether time can be rewritten, whether memory can be trusted, or whether loving someone means saving them even when they are no longer yours to save.

But I know this:

Sacred is alive.

I can feel it in my bones.

And I will find her.

I will tear open archives. I will break into temples. I will drag kings from their thrones and make ancient men explain themselves in complete sentences.

I will walk through fire, through war, through every ugly truth this universe buried beneath my skin.

And if finding my daughter breaks the timeline?

Then the timeline should have behaved better.

—Nysera Vael

The Saturn Priestess

Mother of the Door

Professional inconvenience to every empire that underestimated her