"We return to Nox Eternum," he stated.
I slapped his chest, "I know that. Will you go fighting the Mmuhr’Rhong again? And what will I do? Sit at home and knit?"
"Knit?"
I waved my hands. “Never mind that. Just tellme.”
A deep growl moved through his chest, strangely comforting. “I’ve accepted that fighting the Mmuhr’Rhong is like holding back a flood with a sieve. Eventually, everything drowns.” His voice went low, thoughtful. “We cannot keep striking waves. We need to break the tide. Destroy them from the inside out.”
“You need to find the source,” I whispered, a shiver trickling down my spine as the wordsourceopened a thousand terrible doors.
He nodded once. “Vraax hunts the origin of his kind with the other Space Guardians. It made me see the obvious: my brothers and I must do the same.” His mouth quirked as if the admission cost him. “Alone, even I am only a wall. Together, we might be a blade.”
I squeezed his side; the muscle didn’t give much, but I felt the faint exhale he let out. For the Praetor of War, that was a confession.
“Tell me about the Mmuhr’Rhong,” I pressed. “Do they have a leader? Where do they come from? What do they live off of? Were they always there, when your ancestors went into the Abyss?”
His gaze slid to the dark outside the viewport, as if the answer might be written there. “What weknowis a ledger of deaths,” he said. “They feed on unmaking: heat, light, thought. Anything that can be turned to absence, they harvest. They arrive like mold on a loaf of bread, first spores, then a bloom, then rot.” His jaw tightened. “As for a leader… we have hunted generals, cut off swarms, burned nests. Each time, something else learns. They are patient. Adaptive. Older than our arrogance, if not as old as the Abyss itself.”
“So… not mindless.” My stomach dipped.
“Never mindless,” he said. “But they do not speak as we do. They echo. Chorus and counter-chorus. When one falls, the next remembers.” He glanced down at me. “We used to think they were native to the Dark. Now I am less certain. They move like exiles that found a home.”
My archaeologist brain did what it always did: built a map from rubble. “Then we stop hunting their armies and start hunting theirstory.” I swallowed. “Selkaris.”
The name warmed something like a sunrise across his face. “Arbiter of Memory,” he agreed. “If anyone can sift the centuries for a first footprint, he can.”
“I can help,” I said before fear could trip me. “Excavations aren’t just shovels. They’re patterns, pollen layers, ash bands, midden heaps. Selkaris has the memories, but memories are biased. If we compare what he shows us to material traces, wreck fields, scorched systems, and old signal debris, we might figure out where the bloom began. Or at least where itchanged.”
He studied me like I’d just handed him a new weapon. “You would do this with him?”
“Yes,” I said, surprising myself with how steady my voice sounded. “Show me your ossuaries, your grave-stars, the places you don’t speak about. If the Mmuhr’Rhong learned, then their learning left residue: energy signatures, salvage, even language shards in intercepted noise.” My pulse thudded. “Let me dig. With Selkaris.”
His hand came up, warm and careful, cupping the side of my neck. “Little Aelyth,” he murmured, the words thick with pride. “We will go to him when we reach Nox Eternum. You will have the archives, the fallen charts, the old war songs. We will build your map.”
“And then?” I asked because asking was braver than pretending I didn’t want to know.
“Then,” he said, turning back to the window where the dark lay like waiting water, “we follow the first footprint to the end of it. And we step on the throat that made it.”
I stoodbeneath the star-vault of the great hall, the Council’s light falling in slow constellations across stone older than our sins. Ella was at my side, close enough that I could feel the tremor ripple through her when Thyros’ voice cut the hush.
“Where is Nythor?” he asked, low and iron-steady, but the question carried a blade.
Ella shuddered, and I curved an arm around her. “With the Cryons,” I said. No softening it. “He came for Ella. He tore her from Ilythas' watch. He wanted to use her to find Earth, and when he realized she didn't know, he bartered her to the Cryons, who sold her to the Ohrurs.”
A breath of disbelief moved through the circle.
Vaelion’s jaw locked. Ozyrael swore softly, a prayer turned knife. Thyros’ hands curled, not at me but at the fate of a brother too proud to beg and too foolish to plan.
Selkaris took a step forward. He bowed to Ella, not to me. “I am sorry,” he said, and sorrow colored every syllable. “That one of our own bound your will. That we failed to reach you first.”
Ella’s chin lifted. “You didn’t fail. He did.” Her voice was steady, but she leaned into me a fraction more, as if to anchor the last of the shaking. From the far side of the circle, Dravok’s shadow peeled from the pillar it had chosen. He didn’t waste breath on outrage. “Where is he now?”
“The Cryons have him,” I filled them in, and silence followed my words. All of us were well aware of what that meant. One of us was in the hands of mortals. Never had such a thing been done. The consequences… it was unthinkable. As much as I hated our Oracle and wanted to end his too-long life, we could not let the Cryons keep him. I met Dravok’s eyes and didn’t bother hiding what I wanted. “Bring him back to be punished.”
His mouth didn’t move, but the air cooled. “I will bring him back,” he said. Whole or not, he did not promise.
I let the next truth fall. “The Cryons are already being driven to heel by the Pandraxian Empire. Their fleets took heavy losses. They will not be our largest trouble,” I let that sink in for a moment before I dropped more bombs. "But the Cryons have allied themselves with the Moggadesh and the Ohrur. Something is afoot."
