The irony was brutal. They had not summoned it. They had simply answered without realizing it.
And the Mmuhr'Rhong?
The Mmuhr'Rhong hadn't breached containment on their own. They had been given access. The Black Abyss had found a way to circumvent us Arkhevari. It had found a way to unbind the Mmuhr'Rhong from our thresholds, our rituals, our containment structures.
That alone would have been catastrophic. But that wasn't all. It was possible the Black Abyss had used the Cryons to open a channel, destabilize a threshold, or amplify a frequency they did not understand, but I could not yet see how. OR—the other possibility coiled in my brain. Arkhevari were not infallible. We had already proven that once, during the First Collapse. Boundaries respected for eons could erode. Convictions could fracture. Loyalty could be reinterpreted as necessity. Just look at Nythor, fool that he was now. Once a proud Oracle, he was but a joke of himself. It wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility that if one of us could weaken, then—Abruptly, I cut the thought short. Speculation without evidence was wasteful.
The Cryons had not meant to unleash the Mmuhr'Rhong. That much I was certain of. They were opportunists, not visionaries. If they had tampered with thresholds near singularities, it would have been for profit. For leverage. For advantage. But until I had more evidence of who was at fault, I would keep these thoughts to myself.
For now, Nythor was still in the hands of the Cryons—the rebels. He was the keystone. An Oracle bound in secrecy, his fractured mind incapable of silence. His visions did not merely predict; they stabilized. They imposed coherence on forces that should have remained unstable. The Cryons believed they were extracting information from him. In truth, they were sustaining a connection. Holding open a path they could not perceive, much less control. They thought they were interrogating a prisoner, never realizing they were anchoring a doorway. Which meant the doorway required proximity. Nythor's stabilization field would not radiate evenly. It would create distortions, localized coherence anomalies where threshold turbulence should have remained chaotic.
If Nythor was being used as an anchor, the effects would concentrate near singularity-adjacent corridors alreadyweakened by Cryon experimentation. I reopened the rebel reports in my memory and cross-referenced them against known gravitational anomalies near Pandraxian border territories.
Three regions pulsed brighter than the others. One in particular. An unregulated Cryon refinery station orbiting the outer shear of a collapsed neutron remnant, close enough to a minor singularity that no rational empire would establish infrastructure there. The Cryons, though, were rarely rational when profit was involved. A station too close to the threshold. Too close to Nox Eternum. Too perfectly positioned for an accidental doorway. Cold certainty settled into place. That was where the stabilization would be strongest. That was where Nythor would be.
I fed the coordinates into the ship's nav system, burying them beneath false trajectories and decoy jumps. Anyone watching would see nothing but drift.
The hunt was complete. That should have been the end of it. Instead, the implications unfolded with sickening clarity.
The Abyss had learned how to speak without us.
Not through prophecy. Not through Arkhevari will or sanctioned conduits. But through fracture. Through pressure. Through a mind broken just enough to let coherence leak where silence had once been absolute.
We had always believed ourselves to be the boundary. The necessary translators between creation and what waited beyond it. We were wrong. I sat back, fingers steepled, and let the weight of that realization settle, not on my shoulders, but somewhere deeper, where instinct lives. Where certainty dies.
Somewhere behind a sealed door, Nadine was already probing my ship's systems, testing assumptions I hadn't questioned in millennia.
And for the first time since the First Collapse, I wondered whether the Abyss hadn't been waiting forherinstead. I delayed going to her by plotting a course toward the edge of a dead star and preparing for war. Because this was no longer retrieval. It was containment. If the Abyss had found its voice, then I intended to be the one who silenced it.
Severing the mental connection with my brothers left me… exposed. Arkhevari minds were never meant to be opened in rapid succession. Each communion required a cleansing process, which I hadn't done with either Zapharos or Thyros. Within Nox Eternum, their minds sealed themselves cleanly, restored by the Abyss's stabilizing pressure. Outside it, my process was slower. Messier. Especially after probing two minds in quick succession.
I knew this. Had always known this. I should have grounded myself. Rebuilt the walls. Let the fractures knit before forcing the next separation. I hadn't. Impatience overrode discipline, and I withdrew fully before the damage had time to settle. I left myself open. Vulnerable in a way I had not been since before the First Collapse.
Because the moment I withdrew fully into my own consciousness, somethingelseslipped through. A pressure. Zapharos' and my connection was still too fresh. I felt a rush through him; his Aelyth was calling to him. And beneath it, one name: Ashera.
A name so old, it had been forgotten, buried. I didn't think I would ever hear it again. With my curiosity aroused, I turned without conscious decision, letting the ship's systems fade from relevance as I followed the same pull Zapharos felt sideways rather than forward. I did not tear through space. I did not summon power I no longer possessed—outside Nox Eternum, I couldn't simply teleport as I did inside—my hull stayed behind, while my mind tore through time and space.
It arrived at the Hall of Knowledge, a place filled with memory pools. Not just information, buthistory. The kind that clings to stone and breath and silence long after words fade. Shadows linger longer than they should. Truth echoes even when no one wants it to. It seemed almost natural that thepullwould take me there.
I let myself narrow along the seam between presence and absence, collapsing my observable state while keeping my awareness intact. What remained of me on the ship was my body, a husk. What appeared in the Hall of Knowledge was nothing more than a deepening of darkness between pillars. Time, in such places, did not behave as mortals believed it did. It was not a line progressing forward. It was a field, layered, compressible, capable of overlap. Moments did not vanish when they passed. They settled. From within the echo, I was not bound to sequence. I was anchored to convergence. Zapharos was not there yet. Which meant the Aelyth bond call had not been triggered. Curious.
I adjusted my awareness slightly, testing the temporal alignment. The resonance was precise, positioned at the edge of inevitability. Not after. Not during. Before.
Whatever force had drawn my attention here had not wanted me to witness the bond itself. It wanted me to see the moment preceding it. The unaltered state. The variables before interference. That realization did not comfort me. It meant this was not a coincidence. It meant I had been placed.
From my spot in the shadows, I observed Ella—Zapharos' Aelyth—and Selkaris, Arbiter of Memory, staring at a stone in Ella's hand. The instant her fingers brushed its surface, I felt the activation ripple outward. The artifact woke like a wound remembering how to bleed. The air shifted. The Living Veil stirred. The stone did not speak in sound, but inweight.
It warmed in her hands. Fog rose out of the rock like breath in winter, coiling into a slender column that hovered at eye level. Selkaris straightened, the light from his console washed off his face as the fog turned from gray to starless black shot through with embers. A voice followed the smoke or, possibly, swirled within it; it was hard to tell. It was deep and old. Not spoken so much as remembered. "When the first worlds fell, their fire had no river. All that lived bled into the wound. The wound learned to hunger."
My skin prickled. I had heard this story before. Not in a long time, but that's how it always began. The fog swirled, forming the rough impression of a map, rings curled inward toward a dark heart. Replicating the Dark Abyss.
"Centuries upon centuries, light without source pooled in Nox Eternum, filled it with knowledge, energy, and tragedy. But what devours, learns. What gathers, awakens. Deep in the hollows between dying worlds and stars, a will took shape. We named it Nhal'Vareth."
Selkaris's head snapped toward Ella. His lips shaped the word silently—Nhal'Vareth—like it might bite. The voice went on, uncaring about its audience or their feelings. "Not mind. Not soul. Butwill. It drank heat, and then thought, and then breathed. Those who drifted close felt the pull to look, to know, to enter. Then came the first Arkhevari, to stare into the wound that calls." The fog flexed. For a heartbeat, it suggested figures haloed in light, standing on the edge of an endless black sea. "Then another and another. They all succumbed to its lure, to its promise of endless knowledge. All but one."
A figure broke away from the others, smaller against the dark, hand linked to a second shape wreathed in soft glow.
"He turned and, with his Aelyth, fled the call. Their names were written once and then erased: Caelor and Ashera. Theyvanished into the living veil. Never to be heard from or seen again."
