I let the shadows take me, folding back along the same echo I had used to enter, careful not to linger. The Hall faded. Stone became memory. Memory became distance. And with a final, reluctant pull, the window sealed behind me, leaving Nox Eternum, the stone, and the first true confirmation of what hunted us all safely out of reach.
For now.
I stayed angry on purpose.Anger kept me sharp. Kept me from spiraling back into the moment his hand had brushed my cheek, recalling the impossible electricity of it, the way my body had reacted before my mind could stop it. Anger was safer.
I paced the cabin once more before dropping onto the low seating and pulling the palmtop back into my hands. If I was going to be trapped here, then I was going tousethe time. I resumed my research on the Arkhevari.
I filtered the archives, stripping away anything poetic, anything devotional, anything that smelled like reverence instead of data. What remained was… unsettling.
According to the archives, they were the oldest beings recorded. The creators of life. Creators. The word alone made something behind my eyes tighten painfully. That was theology.Myth. Origin-story propaganda civilizations told themselves when they lacked data. Except this wasn't a myth. This was a cross-referenced, multi-civilizational record. Converging accounts. Independent systems agreeing on the same impossible claim.
It made my head hurt. Not metaphorically. Physically. Like my brain was trying to compress incompatible datasets into the same storage space and overheating in the process.
Creators of life.
Which dragged me right back to the god problem. I didn't want to consider that. I didn't even want to use the word. God implied intent. Design. Omniscience. Moral architecture. Dravok was arrogant. Controlled. Dangerous. Yes. But he wasn't omniscient.
But he was in your head.
The memory hit hard enough that I had to brace myself against the console. He hadn't just influenced me. He hadoverriddenme. My muscles had responded before I had agreed. My thoughts had softened at his insistence. He had wrapped calm around my anger as if it were something he was entitled to manage. My stomach twisted.
That wasn't divinity. That was power.
And power without consent was violation. Anger flared again, hot and stabilizing. He abducted me. He removed me from the emperor's ship. He decided what wastoo dangerousfor me. He made me move. And if he could make me walk… what else could he make me do?
Speak secrets?
Trust him?
Stand down in the middle of a fight?
Agree to something I would never agree to under my own will?
The thought sent a cold ripple through me.
Because there had been a moment—a microscopic, traitorous second—where his presence hadn't felt entirely wrong. It had felt… steady. Like gravity. Predictable. Anchoring.
My pulse spiked.
No.
That was a stress response. Evolutionary wiring interpreting proximity to strength as safety. Adrenaline seeking stabilization. It wasnotattraction. It was not comfort. It was certainly not desire. I swore under my breath, furious at myself.He does not get to hijack my nervous system and then benefit from it. He is not a god. He is not a cosmic inevitability. He is an alien with abilities I do not yet understand.That distinction mattered. Because if it was an ability… it had mechanics. And if it had mechanics…
It could be studied. Disassembled. Explained.
Even if the explanation currently refused to fit into any category my brain recognized. That was the part that hurt. It wasn't that it defied logic. It was that it existed outside my framework. Like discovering a new fundamental force that didn't slot into gravity, electromagnetism, or strong or weak interaction—it was just… there. Operating. Measurable in effect but invisible in cause. A thing that shouldn't exist. Yet did. If the archives were correct—if beings like him had shaped life itself—then maybe the god question wasn't about worship. Maybe it was about scale. And scale did not equal divinity. It meant older physics. Physics I didn't understand yet.
My head throbbed harder.
Because if he wasn't lying—if something about that black hole wasn't just a singularity—then I wasn't dealing with mythology. I was dealing with incomplete cosmology. And incomplete cosmology was far more terrifying. Not because it meant gods were real. But because it meant my equations were missing something fundamental.
Which made Dravok's precision even more disturbing. He wasn't powerful because he broke rules. He was powerful because he understoodwherethe rules thinned. I set that aside and pulled up another folder, older, buried deeper. Ceceaux Seris again. I brought up the files I had previously dismissed. Wondering if they would look different this time. Seris had started cataloguing anomalies near singularities, patterns that repeated when they shouldn't, fluctuations that aligned too neatly with external variables. He'd proposed that black holes weren't merely endpoints, butaccumulators. That information—real information, not just energy—didn't vanish.
When I first read it, I rolled my eyes.
Now I pulled up my own data. Readings I'd taken before Dravok arrived. Spikes I'd flagged as noise. Rhythmic distortions I'd written off as instrumentation error because they violated too many known constraints.
I overlaid Seris' models on top of my scans. The alignment made my breath catch. Not perfect. But close enough to matter. Slowly, I leaned back, staring at the hovering projections as unease settled in my chest.
