The crimson nebula cloud that had been their fragile sanctuary evaporated like morning mist under a harsh, alien sun.
Before them, the Heart of Orion was a catastrophic spectacle – the gaping, unnatural blackness of the void-corruption spreading across its luminous surface like a creeping, cosmic plague, its shadowy tendrils uncoiling with predatory grace, extinguishing starlight itself.
The silent, horrifying consumption of the Felid cruiser was a fresh, visceral image burned into Eva's mind.
"Engine to maximum, what's left of it!" Eva yelled, her voice strained.
She wrestled the Nyxwing's controls, the damaged ship groaning in protest as she pushed it into a desperate, weaving flight path away from the rapidly expanding void.
"Bolt, can you sense which way is clearest?"
Bolt, still reeling from the aftershocks of his earlier empathic exertion and the new, horrifying nature of this threat, clenched his jaw.
The void-corruption wasn't just an absence of light; it was an empathic black hole. It radiated a profound, devouring emptiness, a cold, ancient hunger that sought to extinguish all life, all energy, all hope
It felt like the absolute antithesis of the Ahna'sara, and the sheer alienness of its presence was a psychic assault worse than any physical blow.
"It's… everywhere," he gasped, his transformed body trembling. "Spreading fast. But Krell's fleet… they're in chaos too."
Indeed, through the viewport, they could see the once-mighty Felid armada in disarray. Several smaller vessels were already dark, drifting hulks, ensnared by the void's tendrils. Krell's flagship, the Executioner's Blade, was firing its conventional weapons not at the Heart, but at the encroaching shadows, its powerful beams absorbed with barely a ripple.
The Warlord, in his arrogance, had unleashed a terror that even his own formidable power could not contain. Panic and fear radiated from the Felid ships, a chaotic psychic static that buffeted Bolt's senses.
Eva expertly piloted the damaged Nyxwing through a maelstrom of dying stars, fields of newly formed debris from consumed ships, and pockets of corrupted space where the very laws of physics seemed to fray.
Shadowy tendrils of the void lashed out, narrowly missing their small ship several times, each pass accompanied by a wave of soul-chilling emptiness that made Bolt's fur stand on end and the Ahna'sara within him recoil violently.
He tried to shield them, to project the harmony he had learned in Aethelgard, but it was like trying to hold back a tidal wave of antimatter with a prayer. The void simply… consumed it, leaving him feeling more drained, more vulnerable.
"It feeds on energy," he realized, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Even empathic energy. The more I push, the more it… notices."
"Then don't push!" Eva snapped, her eyes darting between the viewport and her failing sensor displays. "Just guide us! Find a clear path, any path!"
As they fled, Bolt felt the Heart of Orion's own song, already so full of sorrow, begin to fade, overlaid by the void's discordant, devouring silence.
It wasn't just wounded anymore; it was being actively suffocated, its ancient life force dimming under the relentless assault.
The urgency of their mission, of the Last Bark, felt more desperate than ever, yet utterly impossible in the face of this new, overwhelming horror.
Then, amidst a particularly violent evasive maneuver to avoid a lashing void-tendril, something happened.
The Waystone Lyren had given Bolt, tucked securely in a pouch at his side, flared with a sudden, intense green light – the pure, untainted light of Aethelgard.
For an instant, the section of the void-tendril closest to the Nyxwing seemed to recoil, its shadowy form wavering as if struck by something anathema to its nature.
The effect was momentary, gone as quickly as it came, but Bolt felt it. Eva, focused on piloting, hadn't seen.
"The Waystone…" Bolt murmured, reaching for it. As his clawed fingers touched the warm, pulsing crystal, a flicker of understanding, a desperate insight, sparked within the Ahna'sara.
The void fed on raw energy, on chaos, on despair. But the focused, harmonious life-energy of Aethelgard, the pure resonance of the Seed of Hope itself… perhaps that was a frequency it could not easily consume, a light it could not entirely extinguish.
"Eva," he said, his voice stronger, a new idea taking root. "Is there any way to amplify the Waystone's energy? Or… or for me to resonate with it, to project its specific frequency?"
Before Eva could answer, the Nyxwing's proximity alarms shrieked.
They had been so focused on evading the void-tendrils that they hadn't noticed the new readings on their periphery.
"Krell's flagship," Eva breathed, her face grim.
"It's maneuvering. Not towards the Heart… but away from it. It's trying to break free of the main void concentration." Her eyes widened.
"And it's heading roughly in our direction. He's not chasing us, not specifically… he's just running for his life. But his escape path…"
On the tactical display, the crimson icon of the Executioner's Blade was indeed moving, firing its engines in a desperate attempt to pull away from the encroaching void.
And its projected escape vector would take it dangerously close to their current position, through the very patch of relatively clear space they themselves had been aiming for.
Caught between the silent, devouring hunger of the void and the desperate, brutal flight of a cornered Warlord.
The universe, it seemed, had a very dark sense of humor.