Earth 2076: Rajel The Last Noctis Part 1 | Sci-Fi PREVIEW Novella

Once Blood, Once Shadow
The world was younger then, or perhaps it was older—no one remembers anymore. Time, back in the lost ages, did not march so much as drift, like smoke caught between stars. Above a land long gone, two moons hung low and constant, casting silver and shadow in equal measure across the high plains and stone forests where the first true nights were born.

They came without sound. Not because they chose silence, but because it belonged to them—they wore it like skin. Black-pelted, low to the earth, built for glide and pounce, the Noctis moved as if carved from the space between heartbeats. Their eyes burned faint crimson, not with fire, but with thought. Sharp. Patient. Curious.

They were panther-shaped, yes, and predators by necessity, but that was only the shell. Inside was something else—a mind so deep it could map the turning of constellations, predict tides before they swelled, and speak in pulses that never needed voice. Some called them the Old Night. Others whispered they were the first dream the universe ever had, forgotten and left behind.

Kings who ruled empires of dust and gold once knelt before them. Not in worship—rarely in worship—but in need. The Noctis saw patterns others missed, threads woven through bloodlines, through war chants, through the slow rot of power. They counseled, warned, refused. Sometimes they fed, when the hunger came like a tide. But never recklessly. Never without meaning.

And when the empires cracked, as they always did, the Noctis did not die. They disappeared.

Legends say they laid themselves down in chambers deep beneath the world, sealed by song and stone, waiting out the long decay of truth into myth. The Nyx—those who still remember—know the stories are real. They’ve seen the carvings: the fanged silhouette with nine stars above its head, the one that came before the thirst, before the pale skin and quiet fangs.

Because all bloodkind descend from them.

Sanquin, with their silver tongues and courtly hunger. Sanlee, wrapped in silence and moss. Every Nyx-born child who wakes one night to find their teeth too long and their ears too sharp—each carries a thread of Noctis blood, thinned by centuries, frayed by crossbreeding, but still alive.

It began in desperation, they say. A dying people. A collapsing sky. One surviving Noctis lineage, last of their kind, mating not by choice but survival—a merging with a brutish, loud, clever hominid species that burned too fast and forgot too quickly. No conquest. No romance. Just bodies pressed together in the dark, exchanging more than genes. Memories slipped sideways into offspring. Instincts buried beneath laughter and tears. Hunger sharpened. Eyes glowing faint red in mirrors no one dared study too long.

The children were different. Stronger. Faster. Thirsty.

New races were born.

And the Noctis? They vanished deeper.

For millennia, their remains slept: bones in vaulted dark, skulls cradled by roots, pelvises wrapped in prayer cloth. Sacred places, marked with warnings—do not wake, do not take, do not speak the name twice. Traps were set not for robbers, but for fools who believed resurrection was a gift, not a curse.

But now—now, the darkness stirs again.

In the present, with borders cracking and planets starving, with bio-lords selling gene-code to the highest bidder, someone has begun hunting those bones. Not for reverence. For replication. For weapons.

The Coalition knows. Their spies have seen the labs. The failed grafts. The children born screaming, limbs too long, eyes burning. They move quietly, banning gene-sequence trade, raiding cloning dens under red suns. But they’re too late. Something has already been made.

Something that breathes like shadow.

Riven Holt has seen it.

For ten years, he walked alone through Nyx burial grounds, brushing dust from carvings, decoding singsong scripts half-lost to rot. He drank blood-fermented tea with elder clans who remembered names no book kept. He survived traps older than nation-states, climbed ladders of bone, slept beneath arches where the air still hums with old grief.

He wasn’t searching for power. Just truth. A thread to hold.

And he found one.

Not a bone. Not a legend.

Her.

Rajel.

A full Noctis. Not clone. Not hybrid.

Awake.

Born from stolen DNA, grown in dark glass, pulled from stasis after centuries of stillness.

She remembers nothing—except the taste of ancient air, and the sound of two moons rising.

Now she breathes.

Now she thinks.

Now she hunts—not for blood, but for what was taken.

And Riven, standing beside her in the cold light of a world that forgot how to fear the night, understands one thing with quiet certainty:

The age of shadows is not over.

It has only just begun.

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