The alarms of the Leviathan wailed like wounded metal, echoing through the command deck in jagged pulses. Red lights flashed overhead, bathing the room in a steady rhythm of warning. The Astral Rift outside the observation bay swelled, tearing itself wider with every beat, stretching open like a wound that refused to close.
Kael Mercer stood at the center of the bridge, unmoving. His expression didn't change, even as the floor trembled beneath his boots. He'd been in warzones that peeled ships apart, he'd survived collapsing stations and black-zone ambushes, but nothing tightened his chest like the sight of the Rift opening again.
Riven's voice cracked across the deck. "Captain! Hull stress is past sixty percent!"
"How long until breach?" Kael asked.
"Six minutes. Maybe less."
The Rift pulsed once, twice then a violent jolt shook the Leviathan hard enough to knock one of the younger crew to their knees. Kael didn't look away from the swirling silver-black vortex outside. Something was moving inside it. Something large. Something aware.
Then the whisper curled through the speakers.
"You came back…"
Kael's jaw tightened. "Not for you."
Riven stared at the comm panel. "Sir… that voice. It's—"
"I know," Kael cut in.
Lysandra's voice drifted through again. His sister's voice. Gentle, soft, trembling the way it had the last time he heard it. The Rift remembered. It always remembered.
"Kael," the voice whispered. "Help me…"
The entire bridge fell into a cold, stunned silence.
Riven swallowed hard. "Captain… it's using her again."
"It always does." Kael finally turned from the window. "Activate the energy dampeners."
"Sir, if we activate them now the ship becomes an anchor point. The Rift will latch onto us."
"That's the idea."
Riven hesitated only a moment before slamming his hand onto the console. The dampeners roared to life, shaking the entire ship as the Leviathan locked into position, holding the Rift open long enough for Kael to do what no sane man would dare.
The Rift pulsed brighter. A silhouette appeared inside small, trembling, head bowed.
Kael froze.
For half a second, it looked exactly like her. Lysandra. The same slight shape. The same tilt of her shoulders. The faint shift of her breath.
Then the silhouette lifted its head.
And smiled.
Wrong. Too wide. Too sharp. Its face cracked open like glass, revealing hollow, twisting shadows beneath. Limbs bent the wrong way. Spine arching. The illusion snapped completely.
A creature of memory, shaped by grief.
The Void's favorite weapon.
Riven stumbled back. "Void take us…"
Kael didn't blink. "Prep the energy tether."
Riven looked horrified. "Sir… don't do this."
Kael met his eyes. "Now."
Riven slammed the control. A thin current of electric-blue light snapped around Kael's wrist, forming the tether that would keep him connected to the ship for as long as the Leviathan survived the Rift's pull.
Kael approached the doorway, each step heavy and deliberate.
"Captain!" Riven shouted. "Why does it want you so badly?"
Kael stopped at the threshold. The cold from the Rift washed over him like a memory he never wanted.
"Because I escaped once," he said. "And the Void doesn't forgive survivors."
With no further hesitation, he stepped through.
Cold hit him first shocking, brutal, immediate. His breath caught in his chest as darkness wrapped around him like smothering cloth. The world behind him vanished. No light. No sound.
Only whispers.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Voices stacked on top of each other, memories twisted into something hungrier.
Shapes surfaced in the dark faces he knew, faces he lost, faces he wished he could forget. They reached for him with trembling hands, begging in voices that weren't real.
Kael walked forward.
"You're not real," he muttered. "None of you."
The tether tugged behind him, flickering like a dying star. The Rift pressed harder against it, trying to sever the connection, trying to claim him completely.
Then everything went silent.
A deeper voice rose from the void ancient, resonant, echoing inside his bones.
"We remember you, Kael Mercer…"
The darkness shifted.
Something massive stirred ahead. A colossal form emerged from the black, its outline twisting wrong, too wide, too narrow, too fluid to belong to anything born in the normal universe. Eyes opened across its surface if they were eyes and locked onto him.
The Rift Entity.
The same presence he had felt the day Lysandra vanished. The same monstrous awareness. The same hunger.
Kael stopped walking.
"I remember you too," he said quietly. "I've been waiting a long time."
The Entity let out a sound that wasn't a roar or a scream something deeper, something felt instead of heard. The Rift rippled. The tether vibrated so violently Kael felt the sting run up his arm.
On the Leviathan, Riven's voice broke through the comm.
"Captain! Your anchor is destabilizing! You need to move!"
Kael didn't answer.
He stepped closer to the Entity.
He could feel its breath cold like dead stars.
He raised his blade.
The Entity lunged.
Kael braced, muscles coiling like compressed steel. The moment the creature struck, the tether flared bright enough to burn, the connection screaming with strain. Kael slid back several steps, boots scraping across solid nothingness.
He didn't fall.
He didn't bow.
He drove forward, blade cutting into the creature's shifting mass. It didn't bleed it rippled, whole parts of its body bending around the strike like liquid shadow. The Entity's tendrils lashed out, slamming into Kael's ribs hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. But he stayed standing.
"Not this time," Kael growled.
The Entity roared again.
The Rift shook.
The tether blazed.
And Kael charged straight into the heart of the