The ships were leaving.
It wasn't an orderly retreat. It was a scattering. The perfect, geometric grid of the Devourer fleet had dissolved into a chaotic swarm of individual lights, drifting away from Earth like embers rising from a dying fire. They moved without purpose, without coordination, each ship finding its own path into the deep dark.
They weren't fleeing a superior military force. They were fleeing a feeling.
In the extraction hub of The Bastion, the silence was absolute. The white light of the spire had faded, leaving the room in a dim, dusty twilight. The prisoners, who had linked their minds to save the world, were slumped against the walls, exhausted but alive. The technicians who had served Vorn were sitting on the floor, heads in their hands, stripped of their purpose and their leader.
