The First Harvester

The Oort Cloud was a graveyard of ice and rock, a silent testament to the Sun’s dominion, now a fading memory. For eons, it had been the outermost sentinel, a bulwark against the encroaching dark. But on this day, the dark pushed back. Not with a roar, but with a whisper, a tremor that rippled through the frozen void, unseen, unfelt by the dying world below.

The *Harvester* fleet, seventy-two moons of death, had arrived.

The first of them, designated *Harvester Prime* by the Pangu-Makers’ ancient designation, had slipped through the Oort’s icy fingers like a phantom. Its hull, a tapestry of consumed civilizations, shimmered with the faint, spectral light of a billion stolen sunsets. No engines blared, no plasma flared. Its passage was etched in the subtle, chilling desolation that followed, a vacuum that seemed to drink the very silence.