It the prologue of a novel I’ve just written. It may take me a while to post the entire book on this Website.
Title: Echoes of Maldek
Prologue: The Shattered Throne
In the ancient days when Sol burned younger and the stars still whispered to the minds of worlds, there existed a planet known as Maldek — massive, temperate, and thrumming with life. It spun like a jeweled titan between Jupiter and Mars, its blue-green forests and oceans nurturing a civilization older than Earth’s continents.
Orbiting this motherworld was Mars — not the barren red rock known to modern Earthlings, but a vibrant moon-planet cloaked in cerulean skies and oxygen-rich air, teeming with flora, fauna, and thought.
Maldekians were the Architects, engineers of gravity and masters of crystalline quantum consciousness. From their spire-cities carved into living mountains, they seeded the inner planets with microbial gifts, laying the foundation for life. Earth was their garden. Venus, a sister now lost to fire, was once a laboratory of cloud-cities and high-albedo towers.
But in their pride, the Maldekians delved into forbidden energy — the Corestream, a force drawn from the dark lattice between dimensions. It offered immortality, infinite power, and a price no world could afford.
When the War of Splintering broke out, not even Mars remained neutral. The Martian outposts, known as the Crimson Synod, rebelled against Maldek’s dominion, fearing annihilation from their parent world’s experiments. As the conflict raged, one final weapon was used — the Omega Core, a zero-point destabilizer that tore Maldek asunder, reducing the planet to the scattered belt of ruins now misnamed “the Asteroids.”
But Mars survived.
Scorched and cratered, yes — but alive. Its ancient biosphere buried beneath dust, its atmosphere thinned but not gone. The survivors of Maldek — scientists, warriors, refugees — fled to Mars, carving cities into canyons, adapting, rebuilding.
They called themselves the Remnants.