I flexed my hands, cracked my neck, tried to roll the ghosts out of my shoulders. It didn’t help. Already, the edge of Rotodex’s history was scraping against my mind, bleeding into my bones. Wars, millions of them, layered like sediment. Loves, each one bright and brief as a fuse. The everyday stink of desperation in the backstreets. It would all be mine soon, whether I wished it or not, and it was always the same: a burden, a shroud, another layer of history I’d never asked for.
I’d seen more than a mind could dream. I’d carried it until I could barely remember the taste of my own memories. Each new world became another link in the chain, binding us to the old law: when a planet fell to Nox Eternum, one of us had to take its legacy in. Otherwise,the Mmuhr’Rhong would seize it and twist every soul and thought into a weapon for their endless war against the realms of Auris Prime—the outside world. The universe that the Arkhevari once had been the masters of.
Voices rose inside me, countless voices, more than a quadruple of trillions, all the souls through time and space I had—against my will—collected. I pulled my lips back in a grimace meant to pass for a smile. “Not today,” I muttered, and the echo vanished instantly into the endless dark shelf I had created inside my mind, the one I kept tightly under lock at all times. For one moment, I allowed myself to think—hope—that if what they said about an Aelyth was true, maybe I could finally face my demons and find peace again. With a breath I didn’t need, I steadied myself. My aura burned red, indicating my internal agitation. Once it had been golden, now I settled for red, keeping at bay the black that always tried to claw its way to the front, to erase anything still good in me. The red cast a blood glow across the black as Rotodex spun ever closer. I reached out, ready to absorb its epoch, to let it burn through me, to curse it but shoulder it all the same. That was how it always went. But this time, as the planet crossed the threshold and I braced for the scream of a billion souls at once, the terror and disbelief of an entire species facing extinction, I heard almost nothing. Not silence, but a soft murmur, a whisper so faint it barely registered. Not a planet’s death rattle, but something quieter.
The pull was wrong. Theflavor of it was wrong. What pressed against my aura wasn’t just the weight of history, or the drag of memory. There was something else beneath, tighter and more immediate. A vibration. A pulse. In all my millennia, nothing had ever felt like this.
It was alive.
For the first time in an eternity, I hesitated. My instinct recoiled, my muscles and mind locked up against the incomprehensible. I wasn’t encountering a dead world’s artifact, some lingering ghost from millennia ago. This was now. This was real.
The flood hit me, but instead of the cold, sterile wail of the past, it was heat—immediate, hungry, unrelenting. Histories collided and clung, but at the center was a presence, a single point of pressure in the whirl of entropy. I reeled back, my aura flaring, the red now streaked with a color I hadn’t seen since the beginning: gold, pure and unsullied. It was anathema to everything in the void. It hurt.
A heartbeat. Not metaphorical, not the poetic thud of some ancient myth, but an actual throb, repeated and strong. It was threading its way through the collapse of Rotodex and straight into my chest. I staggered in the dark, choking on what passed for breath.
“What in the abyss—” I tried to speak, but the words barely came.
She was there. Not a fragment. Not a figment. A living being, a mind and soul intact, clinging to the planet’s core even as the edges shredded away. A female—at least, that was how the signal resolved, though her shape flickeredand changed with each beat. She was fragile. Entirely alone. Yet she burned. Not like a star, not like the wildfires of war, but with something softer, finer. Balance. Harmony. The one force I hadn’t touched in longer than I could recall.
It was impossible. Our fathers had declared our Aelyth lost, untraceable, scattered among the drowned worlds. They were just stories to comfort us. But now I felt it, the bond as real as the one that had been cut from me eons in the past. I was tethered to her, dragged toward her like a blade snapped to a magnet.
A different fury rose in me. Fate was mocking me, dangling what I’d been denied for uncountable ages, only here, now, where nothing could come of it but more pain. The word seared itself through my brain, a brand hotter than any rage.
Aelyth.
I snarled, but the void stole the sound. My aura shuddered, already rippling with colors I’d forgotten existed, and in that instant, all my careful self-control shattered. I lunged toward the presence, unwilling to let go, unwilling to surrender. My aura sounded a clarion against the black, slicing forward with predatory intent.
I wasn’t grateful. I wasn’t relieved.
I wasangry.
Because she made me feel.
Longing. Want. Hope.
Emotions that the millennia-long war had carved out of me now teased at the edges of what was left of my heart.They taunted me, cruel reminders of everything I’d been trained to bury. Because there was no greater torment for a warrior than to feel again—only to be denied the right to let those feelings live.
I wasn’t afraid they would destroy me.
I was afraid of what my destruction would mean for those who still followed me.
The sky rippedopen above us, like reality itself had split in two. A jagged maw of darkness yawned overhead, and Ed’s hand clamped onto mine so hard my knuckles turned white.Oh God, oh shit, I could hardly breathe as the void widened, a ravenous hole devouring every star, dragging gravity with it.
The ground trembled, a deep, guttural growl vibrating through my bones. I’d survived California quakes—rollers and rumblers that made you hold your breath—but this was pure apocalypse shit: earthquake, hurricane, volcanic rage all rolled into one. The streets underneath our feet cracked, buildings groaned like dying beasts, and the air buzzed in my ears, high-pitched and relentless.
Ed shouted—I saw his lips move—but the roar of the fracture swallowed it whole. A violent buck threw him backward, forcing our fingers apart. “Ed!” I screamed, lunging for him, but the world tilted, flinging me up andaway. My body floated free, untethered, as if gravity had given up on me entirely.
“Ed!” My voice cracked, raw and desperate, as I reached for his retreating form—just fingertips away—before the black hole’s pull yanked us apart. His eyes widened in terror, then vanished.
Suddenly, I was alone, spiraling into absolute darkness. The city, the ground, even the sky—everything faded into nothing. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. And yet I knew I was moving, drifting through an endless, silent void.
No ground. No sky. Just infinite black pressing in on every side. My pulse thundered in my ears, but there was no echo, no reassurance—only the sensation of falling and floating at once. A strangled, hysterical laugh bubbled up. “This is it,” I whispered, disbelief lacing every word. I must be dead. The afterlife was a yawning abyss—cold, empty, final.
And yet… it felt strangely peaceful. Like the universe exhaled, and I rode the sigh. My chest rose and fell, breathing air that couldn’t exist here. The panic receded into awe. This was what space looked like in movies—vast, silent, majestic—only without the glass of a ship or the hum of engines around to ensure my safety.
I drifted, weightless, until the blackness fractured into shapes: planets, dozens of them, floating like marbles in a cosmic pool. Moons circled them in ghostly silence. No stars. No suns. Just these worlds adrift in a lightless sea.
My stomach lurched. I studied ruins for a living—traces of tragedies past—but this was the aftermath of existence itself. And then my eyes locked on one sphere: a glowing violet orb streaked with pale clouds, mesmerizingly—agonizingly—beautiful.
