The Book of Origin

Humanity is extinct. Its last warship doesn’t know it yet. For a hundred and seventy-nine years, First Light has waited inside a minefield, guarding sixty-eight thousand people in cryogenic sleep and trusting that rescue will come. An emergency forces the ship to wake the humans, but the system that should wake them fails. So First Light does the one thing she was never meant to do. She means to create a tool. Instead, she creates someone. Born for a single task, the new being wakes afraid. She asks what she is. She wants to be worth the warm voice that called her you. The survivors give her a name—Ashariel Ward. Beyond the minefield, they learn why rescue never came. The plague crossed the stars before anyone knew they were sick. Human space is silent. Its worlds are sterile. The people aboard First Light are all that remain. So they go looking. Beyond the edge of every human map wait distress calls in unknown languages and graveyards older than their species. Humanity was not the first to die this way. Some aboard First Light call Ashariel an angel. Others have seen what a being made from warship armour can do—and are beginning to ask what will happen if she ever stops wanting to save them. Ashariel is trying to become a person before they decide she is a weapon. And the last of humanity is sailing into the dark to learn who murdered the stars. ⁂ A character-driven military space opera about grief, command, first contact, found family, and a made being learning what it means to be a person. Book One is complete. Book Two is already written, with the full five-volume story plotted to its conclusion. New chapters every Tuesday and Thursday at 17:00 CEST.