Nith

6,147 confirmed operations. Zero confirmed sightings.

I am one of those operations.

The infiltration of Nethyra-9 should have killed me. Every extraction route was compromised. Enemy psionics swept every shadow. My crystal was cracked along the second lattice and I could feel the light bleeding out. A slow pulse. Visible in the dark.

They would find me.

Then space bent. Not shadows. Space itself. The geometry of the room folded wrong. The psionic sweep passed through where I stood. Through, not over. I felt it touch nothing.

Something was watching. Not the enemy. Something behind the architecture. Something that wanted me gone.

I left.

The Veil Track marked my mission as Nith-assisted. I asked what that meant. They showed me 6,147 operations where the impossible happened. Where compromised Skarn simply were not there when the enemy looked. Where attention bent away like light around a singularity.

Zero confirmed sightings. No psionic trace. The Mind Track spent centuries analyzing these events. Their position: Nith may not exist.

But I know what I felt.

The few who claim to have glimpsed Nith describe something that will not hold shape. Features that slide when you try to focus. A presence that makes you look at your own hands to confirm you still exist. Most recant within days. They decide they imagined it.

Most. Not all.

Some believe Nith is what happens when a Skarn perfects the art of not being seen. That stealth taken far enough erases the self. Infiltration refined into absence.

I think about how good I was. How good I am.

I think about what I might become.

Did something save me on Nethyra-9? Or did I save myself and invent a witness because the alternative is worse?

The crack in my crystal is still there. I touch it sometimes. Press my finger into the fracture until the light pulses back.

Proof that I was there.

Proof that something happened.