Chapter 9 DRAVOK
I should have gone to her. The thought surfaced as the ship slipped free of the emperor's gravity well, dissolving into open space with practiced silence.
Nadine was secured, furious, and already testing boundaries I hadn't intended her to reach so quickly.
But I didn't. Instead, I let the ship drift, emissions flattened, presences thinned until we became irrelevant noise among dead stars.
Then I turned inward and did what few Arkhevari ever chose to do willingly: I opened myself to memory. Not mine alone.
The Abyss remembered everything it swallowed.
Worlds did not vanish when they fell; they imprinted.
Heat, fear, final decisions, the last patterns of civilizations compressed into echoes that lingered long after matter collapsed.
I had walked through those echoes before.
I allowed my mind to brush against them now.
A ruined ocean-world, its last sun flickering out as cities boiled away.
A lattice civilization that had sung itself into extinction.
A Cryon research moon, cracked open by curiosity that it couldn't survive.
I sifted through them carefully, extracting context, motive, and anomaly.
If the Abyss had reached out before—if it had spoken to mortals—there would be precedent here.
There was none. Only silence. The Abyss did not repeat itself easily.
When it adapted, it did so deliberately.
I exhaled slowly. Then, with more reluctance than I cared to admit, I shifted targets: homing in on my brothers.
Arkhevari minds were not meant to be accessed casually.
We shared lineage, memory structures, and thresholds that made such contact…
intimate. Invasive. It was a boundary that even we respected.
Normally. Today, I needed information. I reached for Zapharos' mind first, where I was met with war immediately, resolve honed to a lethal edge.
A blade drawn across stars. That was expected.
I moved past it, deeper, beneath the surface fury.
There. I searched through fragments he had gathered while on Auris Prime.
Not deliberate espionage, these were fragments he had subconsciously picked up.
Pattern recognition beneath his focus on Ella.
I learned about entire Cryon fleets that had been dismantled by the Pandraxians. Their leadership fractured. Their empire absorbed under Daryus' rule. Victory, on the surface.
But beneath it lurked something unfinished.
Like it always did after the annihilation of an entire civilization.
There were always a few left ready to fight and reestablish their old world.
I followed the thread. Followed reports that were dismissed as noise, Cryon enclaves that should not have existed, supply chains rerouted through unmonitored corridors.
Discovered cells operating independently. Calling themselves autonomous: Rebels.
I withdrew before Zapharos' awareness could sharpen toward me, then reached for Thyros. His mind greeted me with fire. Judgment. Violence shaped into law. His memories were cleaner. Interrogations. Captured Cryon operatives speaking of voices. Guidance. Promises whispered from nowhere.
Interesting. Those voices were neither Arkhevari nor gods. They came from something far older. Cold recognition settled inside me as I followed more threads regarding the so-called rebels, but like Thyros, I set them aside for now before I severed the contact completely.
The hum of the ship grounded me as my mind collapsed back into itself.
I ran a hand through my hair and summarized.
The Cryons were no longer sovereign. The Pandraxian Empire had swallowed them whole—or believed it had.
But fragments had slipped through the cracks.
Rebel factions moved in the dark, convinced they were reclaiming control—holding control.
They were wrong. They were being used. The Abyss had not reached out directly.
It had listened. It had found receptive minds near thresholds, stations too close to singularities, experiments conducted where they never should have been.
The Cryons had no boundaries. If profit scented the air, they pursued it.
No matter how deep they had to dig. No matter what they disturbed.
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 already weakened 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 for her instead.
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.