• DOCUMENT ID: JRN-VNC-734-A
• CLASSIFICATION: Level 3 Field Research (Personal Log)
• SUBJECT: Field Journal of Elara Vance, Xenological Correspondent for The Universal Inquiry. Expedition to Krystallos Prime.

[LOG ENTRY: CYCLE 223.88.02]

Landed on Krystallos Prime. The light from the low, violet sun glitters off a landscape of impossible geometry. The air is thin, and the only sound is the wind and the faint, grinding scrape of our expedition’s crawlers. The subject of my investigation, the so-called “Geode-Tortoises,” are everywhere. They are magnificent, geological absurdities. Mountains of living crystal, moving with an infuriating, glacial slowness.

My commission is straightforward: report on the central debate surrounding this species. Are they sentient beings with a right to exist, as the preservationist factions claim? Or are they, as the powerful Artisan-Miner Guild asserts, simply unique bio-mineralogical formations—“geovores”—that produce a uniquely valuable resource? The Ancestor-Shell Shards harvested from their carapaces are a key component in masterwork psionic amplifiers and command-grade armor. The Fact of their value is undeniable. The Faith in their sanctity is what’s in question. My job is to find the truth, or at least, a story that sells.

[LOG ENTRY: CYCLE 223.91.05]

Have been observing a herd for three cycles. “Herd” feels like the wrong word. They are a congress of stones. Our contract guide, a gruff poacher named Jax, scoffs at my patience. “Just rocks that move,” he grunts, polishing the thermal lance on his rig. “You want to understand them? Core one. See what it’s made of.”

His pragmatism is… compelling. From a purely scientific perspective, they exhibit no signs of higher intelligence. They consume silicates from the soil. They move, very slowly, toward sources of geothermal energy. They do not react to our presence. There are no social structures, no tool use, no language. And yet… there are patterns. They arrange themselves in vast, slow-moving spirals. Sometimes, late in the twilight cycle, they begin to hum. A low, chime-like resonance that vibrates in your teeth. It’s beautiful, but is it communication? Or is it just the meaningless sound of a strange biology, a Fiction we are imposing on a simple creature?

[LOG ENTRY: CYCLE 223.93.01]

Today, Jax’s patience ran out. He’d identified a “prime specimen”—an ancient, massive Krystallos whose shell was a masterpiece of intricate, glowing facets. He claimed its shard would be worth a planetary governor’s ransom. He moved his rig into position, the thermal lance beginning to glow with terrifying heat.

I moved to stop him, to argue for more observation time, but it was the Krystallos themselves who acted. Not with violence. With… order. The slow, random-seeming movements of the herd resolved into a single, unified action. They began to converge on the ancient one, forming a living wall of crystal, shielding it from Jax’s rig. It wasn’t a panicked stampede. It was a deliberate, silent, tactical maneuver. A sacrifice.

Jax was furious. “What is this? What are they doing?”

I didn’t have an answer. I only had a thousand new questions.

[LOG ENTRY: CYCLE 223.93.03]

He tried again. He found a younger, isolated Krystallos and moved in quickly. This time, there was no herd to protect it. I recorded everything, my journalistic detachment a thin shield against the feeling of dread. As Jax’s lance made contact with the shell, it happened.

It wasn’t a sound. It was… a broadcast. My comms unit shrieked with static, my visual feed flooded with ghost-images, but the true signal was in my mind. The interface of my neural link shattered into a billion shards of light. I was seeing… feeling… a history. A holocaust of memory.

The Eidos of a thousand generations. The slow, patient joy of a life lived over millennia. The feeling of the sun on a growing crystal. And then, the blinding, agonizing pain of a shell being shattered, of an entire ancestral lineage being wiped out in a flash of heat. I felt the [grief] of a people whose sacred tombs and living children were one and the same. I experienced the [sacrilege] not as an abstract concept, but as a physical violation. This wasn’t a sound. It was a story. A million Threads of memory, screaming in unison.

[LOG ENTRY: CYCLE 223.93.04]

Jax is dead. The psychic feedback from the Krystallos’s death-scream overloaded his rig’s systems and then… I overloaded him. It was retribution, not justice. One life in return for a genocide. I am sitting here, in the shadow of his silent crawler, looking at the two corpses. One is a magnificent creature of crystal and time, now a shattered ruin. The other is a man who died because he could not comprehend that a rock could have a soul.

I came here to report on a debate. To weigh the Fact of a resource against a sentimental Fiction. But I was asking the wrong question. The Krystallos do not have a Faith that their shells are sacred. Their shells are their faith, their history, their children, their gods. It is a Fact. A fact my instruments could not measure, but one my mind can now never forget.

My report will be filed. But my work has changed. These are not creatures to be studied or resources to be harvested. They are a people to be protected. Let the Artisan-Miner Guild send their gods-damned assassins. My new-found Faith is greater than any armor they could ever build. I will remain here, preparing for them by hunting the agents of their infinite genocides on this world.

[TRANSCRIPT ENDS]