Bolt's words, rasped from a throat raw with exhaustion and the effort of his earlier empathic song, hung in the cold, recycled air of the Nyxwing's bridge: "He unleashed something else."
Eva, cradling her throbbing shoulder, stared at him, her heart sinking further.
"Unleashed what, Bolt? What do you mean?"
He struggled to sit up straighter, his transformed body still aching, the silver light of the Ahna'sara a faint, flickering pulse beneath his dark fur.
His blue eyes, burning with that new, unsettling intensity she'd seen upon his reawakening, seemed to look through the bulkheads of the ship, towards the distant, wounded Heart of Orion.
"It's… a resonance," he began, his brow furrowed in concentration as he tried to translate the alien sensations into words.
"But it's not like the Heart's pain, or Krell's anger. This is… hollow. A void-song. Like a wound that isn't just bleeding energy, but… consuming light. Spreading."
He shuddered.
"When Krell's weapon hit the Heart, it didn't just damage it. It tore something open. Something that was sealed away."
A new, more profound dread settled over Eva.
She forced herself to the primary sensor console, her injured arm sending jolts of agony up her neck.
"Can our sensors pick it up? What am I looking for?" Most of the external visual feeds were still just the swirling, beautiful chaos of the crimson nebula cloud that hid them.
"Look for… an absence," Bolt murmured, his gaze distant. "A patch of… wrongness near the impact site on the Heart. Where the light doesn't just dim, but… dies."
With trembling fingers, Eva rerouted auxiliary power to the long-range optical sensors, bypassing the damaged primary arrays.
She focused them on the coordinates where they'd last seen the Heart of Orion before diving into the cloud.
The image that slowly resolved on the main viewport, magnified and filtered through layers of nebular gas, made her breath catch.
The Heart of Orion still pulsed, a colossal sphere of fractured light, but the gash left by Krell's Despoiler beam was no longer just a bleeding wound of raw energy. It was… darkening.
A patch of absolute, unnatural blackness was spreading outwards from the impact point, like a creeping cosmic gangrene, extinguishing the Heart's inherent luminosity.
And from this spreading void, faint, shadowy tendrils, almost too ethereal to see, seemed to be uncoiling, reaching tentatively into the surrounding nebula.
"Void take us all," Eva whispered, a cold knot of fear tightening in her stomach. "What is that?"
Suddenly, Bolt stiffened, a low growl emanating from his chest. "It's not just the Heart. Krell's fleet… they're feeling it too." He closed his eyes, concentrating.
"Confusion. Alarm. Some of his ships near the Heart… their energy signatures are fluctuating wildly, as if something is… draining them."
This was no controlled aftermath of Krell's attack. This was something new, something unplanned, something alien.
Eva remembered fragments of Lyren and Coria's lessons in Aethelgard – hushed warnings about the Progenitors' most dangerous experiments, about entities from beyond the veil of known space, "void-bringers" that fed on energy and sowed discord, beings the Progenitors themselves had struggled to contain or banish.
Had Krell, in his arrogant pursuit of power, inadvertently broken a seal on such an ancient, cosmic horror?
The Waystone, still clutched in Eva's good hand, began to pulse with a frantic, discordant rhythm, its usual warm green light now shot through with flashes of sickly yellow.
It was reacting to the spreading darkness from the Heart, a clear signal of profound imbalance and danger.
"The cloud," Bolt said suddenly, his eyes snapping open, alert and filled with a new urgency.
"Eva, the nebula cloud we're in… it's thinning. The energy from that… that thing on the Heart is affecting it."
She looked at the external sensors. He was right. The dense, concealing gases around them were beginning to dissipate, swirling away as if pushed by an unseen force emanating from the corrupted Heart.
Their hiding place wouldn't last much longer.
"We have to move," Eva said, her mind racing.
But where? Deeper into the nebula, risking its natural hazards?
Try to find another songline, if the Nyxwing could even manage it in its current state?
Before they could formulate a plan, a new horror filled the viewport.
From the direction of Krell's fleet, one of the smaller Felid cruisers, which had been positioned closest to the spreading void on the Heart, suddenly convulsed.
Its lights flickered and died. Then, with a horrifying, silent implosion, it began to be drawn towards the Heart's dark wound, shadowy tendrils from the void visibly latching onto it, pulling it into the consuming blackness.
There were no distress calls. No escape pods. Just a swift, silent, and utter consumption.
Warlord Krell had sought to control a cosmic power. Instead, it seemed he had unleashed a cosmic plague, a scar's deeper poison that now threatened to devour everything in its path – including, imminently, the crippled Nyxwing.