Slowly, life; robust and brutal as it was, began to claw out a niche. The world had lived. Given time, the things that lived here might achieve . . . anything.

Too late. Dealt a bad hand by fate, theirs was cut short. When the star died, nothing on the planet stood any chance of survival. The sun waned, and missing its influence, the world was cast into the emptiness of space as if released from a sling. It gained enough distance to remain intact even when its atmosphere was blasted away by radiation, and all the living matter withered in the flames of a supernova. The planet turned molten, then quickly froze in the hard cold vacuum that would last forever.

What remained of the living had pressed into hard crystals of carbon, littering the surface.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the world would move towards other systems. Caught by the hints of gravity from stars hundreds of light years away, the lost planet began to drift towards one of the nearest. It took millions of years but eventually, by complete chance, it began to approach an area of space called, by those who lived there, the Vapour Heights, and a system called Bune. A system with two living worlds, twins: Ryune and Kessen, both populated by the same species, who, in the greater picture, had just learned to move beyond their home world.

Chapter 1: Dead Drop