Star prisoners

They departed for the stars, leaving behind only legends and pyramids. But the ancient Egyptians were no primitive builders—they were a mighty race of starfarers. Now one of them, Horus, son of Osiris, returns home after thousands of years of wandering.

But what awaits him home is not the glory of his ancestors, but a world that has forgotten its name and its true creators. The land he remembered as the blooming Hikuptah is now entangled in the paradise of the afterlife—the Noosphere. The system his people created for eternal life has become a prison for billions of souls.

Horus, the last "god" of a vanished civilization, must unite with those he considered savages. Together, they must accomplish the impossible: awaken Memory in the heart of Oblivion itself.

From the deserts of Egypt to the heart of the Orion Nebula, their path leads to the source of the greatest deception and the final choice: destroy the disease or heal it, giving suffering new meaning. Their choice will determine the fate of billions: to remain in a sweet dream or to awaken to the bitter truth of freedom. Even if the price of awakening is chaos.

The object, cataloged by NASA as 4I/Rubin, was first spotted beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It was of no particular interest—just another chunk of water ice and frozen gases, millions of which roam space. Its trajectory, however, was unusual, indicating an interstellar origin. Astronomers dubbed it "Wanderer."

Wanderer passed the asteroid belt without hitting anything. It swept past Mars without even noticing it. Its path lay toward the Sun. Calculations showed that it would perform a risky gravitational pull around the star and be flung back into the abyss, toward new, unknown worlds.
And so, having reached perihelion, when the Sun's hot corona should have vaporized its icy shell, Wanderer accomplished the impossible.
It didn't evaporate.

Instead, its dark, porous core, not composed of ice at all, absorbed the monstrous energy of the flare. Superconducting circuits, dormant for millennia, awakened. The icy mantle, serving as both shield and camouflage, was cast off, vaporized into a blinding coma that for several hours eclipsed Venus in the Earth's sky. And when the plasma dissipated, ground-based telescopes detected not a cometary nucleus, but a perfectly smooth, elongated object, resembling a black spindle or a spearhead. It was darker than the night sky and absorbed up to 99.9% of the light that fell upon it.

The Wanderer changed course. Now it was hurtling purposefully toward the third planet from the Sun. This was not a dying visitor from the depths of space. It was a ship.
And it was returning home.