POVSern
Caretaker-class android
Moving across a planet that has begun, quietly, to rearrange itself.
All stories
Astra Echoes Prequel · 2602
Ashfall Rising.
The fire that refused to die
PublishedAshfall Rising is a novella in the Astra Echoes science fiction series by Gaby Oron, part of the Astra Echoes Prequel.
When an impossible message reaches Somnia Magna from a world silent for generations, Captain Vivian Hayes is sent to find its source. What waits on Sacramentum is more than a distress call—and someone already knows she is coming.
For readers ofThe Expanse and Children of Time
ISBN 978-1-9191806-3-2
18
Chapters
3
POV voices
2602
In-universe year
0
Canon events
The signal was faint—barely distinguishable from the cosmic static that washed over Somnia Magna's sensors. But it was there. A repeating pattern, too regular to be natural.
What it's about
The signal after the fire.
The second Astra Echoes novella follows the ashfall after Meridian: Sern moves across a planet that has begun to rearrange itself, while Signals Officer Vivian Hayes is sent to trace an impossible message back to its source.
Theme 01
Aftermath
The station is gone, but its signal is still moving through the colonies—and through the people left behind.
Theme 02
Connection
Lives moving on separate paths begin to converge around a message that should have vanished years ago.
Theme 03
Survival
Every rescue creates another obligation. Every promise has to survive the distance between worlds.
Inside the book
What you'll find.
Eighteen chapters
A complete second novella drawn directly from the linked manuscript record.
A signal in the ash
A repeating transmission emerges from Praetorium space, carrying a voice that should not be there.
Lives carried forward
Sern moves through the aftermath while a signal from the past begins to resolve.
The next step in the canon
The bridge between the destruction of Meridian and the wider conflict beginning to surface.
The cast
Who carries the signal.
The people moving through the ash after Meridian.
POV
POVVivian Hayes
Signals officer
Signals officer, Somnia Magna. Alliance of Free Worlds.
First pages
Read the opening.
Chapter One · Signal in the Ash
The signal was faint—barely distinguishable from the cosmic static that washed over Somnia Magna's sensors. But it was there. A repeating pattern, too regular to be natural.
Vivian's fingers cramped against the console, nails digging into synthetic polymer. Blood rushed in her ears, drowning out the ambient hum of life support, the steady breathing of the night shift technicians. Twenty-three minutes she'd been staring at the anomaly. Afraid to blink. Afraid it would vanish like the ghost it might well be.
The readout flickered—signal strength dropping to 0.37, then 0.36. Fading.
"Shit," she whispered, throat dry as sand. "Come on, you bastard. Stay with me."
Keep reading
What comes next.
Next · In editing
Echoes of Erigo
Book I of the Astra Echoes Trilogy.
Eight years after Meridian, Erigo is the oldest city on Sacramentum — until the reactor at its heart is pushed past the point of failure and six hundred thousand people are sealed inside their towers to die. Poppy Hadley digs out of the ash carrying her sister’s scorched locket and a message hidden inside it she was never meant to read. Mason Wright climbs out of the same rubble with proof the lockdown order was written before the reactor failed.
The frequency registry
Early chapters, delivered first.
Subscribers read the first chapter of every new book before release — plus short stories between novels, cover reveals, and the occasional in-world transmission you won't find anywhere else.