The Shadow of Kaon

Rising darkness

The screen flashed with a bright red light in front of the femme, making her let out an exhausted sigh at the results it showed.

Her digits tapped against the keyboard again and again, only stopping for a few short seconds to adjust her balance or rub her hand over her face, trying to compose herself against the tension that threatened to overtake her mind with every new red flash, but then she continued quickly after, not wanting to waste any more seconds.

The pages in front of her contained important documents, files that included the original Cybertronian language in many places, and old descriptions of artifacts and rare treasures the archives had hidden even before the war, all acquired from the Hall of Records when the Decepticon forces stormed the upper-level buildings in one of their larger raids.

Until now, all the information they could decode from these appeared completely useless. They were nothing more than vague reports about the state of the relics over the years, old star maps from long-abandoned seeker routes between systems, and smaller translated segments of the Covenant of Primus by none other than Alpha Trion himself. Many bots have been working on these files over the years, squeezing out every last bit of information, every possible fragment that could be the basis of the Autobots' secret codings, and even though she had worked on them previously too, this time it was for a completely different reason.

Now, instead of secret codes and keywords, the Covenant's scattered fragments were the most important elements of these files.

The Covenant of Primus, the ancient artifact which was entrusted to the third of the first Thirteen, containing most of Cybertron's history on its pages, past, present, and future... it was something every bot would have wanted to take even a glimpse at.

Getting their servos on any of it could have meant an advantage against the Autobots, but with the book being lost for eons, only these small pieces remained from it. All the half-word translations, uncertain interpretations, and the notes that Alpha Trion used in an attempt to decipher the secrets of the book were all laid out before Darkwing as she rubbed the back of her hand against her tired optics, trying to concentrate on the already blurring texts, but the signs were still just unfamiliar symbols on the screen, not revealing any of their secrets.

Her shift ended hours ago; maybe even the next shift had finished their work for the day too, but the femme was too determined to stop at this point.

It was all in front of her. Every entry of the hundreds of bots who have been working on this project, every discovery the scholars have made over the years, the precalculated orbits of countless star systems and reports from far away stations, and even if she couldn't understand all of it, it seemed like everything had pointed in the same direction in these files.

Only if she could see through the mountain of information with a clear processor...

She stared at the screen with empty optics, hoping that if she looked hard enough the answer would reveal itself, but then, from the darkness behind her that even the lights of the computer couldn't reach, a small, metallic scraping sound came.

It was quiet, almost unnoticeable for any other bot, but for Darkwing, it was enough to make her wings tense up with worry, freezing her frame straight in its place.

Her antennas moved up and down anxiously, the tiredness that only moments ago covered her mind clearing up quickly until all of her nerves were focusing on her surroundings, and with a short, hidden move over the keyboard, she closed most of the files, leaving only the most basic reports open and nothing more.

She listened, separating every little noise that the engines and other machines around her could make, and when she became certain that it couldn't have come from any of them, she gulped lightly, trying to hide the tension in her wings by lowering them back to their original position.