Crack.
The sky shatters like glass, pieces of fragmented void falling away to show the flickering chaos it held back, the blinding light bleeding through the fractures of what has not yet crumbled.
Voices are hoarse, yelling. It happened fast, nearly as fast as Solbee could predict it. The kids were gone the moment he knew something was wrong, sent safely away to the protected ship of distant clade in the land of the living, but there were many bodies left behind in the madness. Ghosts disappearing, being erased.
And Solbee?
He’s selfish.
A witch of life stands at his side, a woman with long spiraling horns that indicates surprising age before her death, fuchsia wings fluttering as she does her best to work quickly. Dualscar was revived first, despite his reluctance, because he was a rock in which the children needed, and quickly, to still the chaos on the other side. The cat follows, at the insistence of the youngest, and for the ease in which Sanity’s young life could be restored comparatively.
Psii is to follow, but he has a lot of life to restore, a lot of sweeps to etch into a living form, old and without reason to still move on. He stayed behind for his mate, to oversee, to make sure nothing goes wrong.
That’s when they lost the first troll.
A deep fracture shattered, renewing the voices of the adult trolls as they scatter, panic rising as the strongest but youngest is uprooted by the powerful black hole. Not even Equius’s hands are strong enough to claw at the wood of the deck and keep himself anchored, the wood splinters beneath his rough hands, and he’s bulled into a void with a scream that’s swallowed by the noise of the beastly event itself, the churn of destruction and hunger that swallows the fragments of the bubble. Solbee’s too distracted, too focused on the screams in his head, the screams around him, ushering his mate to the other side, into the frantically worried arms of many Amporas and their children.
He doesn’t place Eri’s voice, screaming for his mate.
He doesn’t see the violet wings shimmering to life.
It’s too late when he looks, the golden-violet blur of troll flying headfirst into the hole, as if he could catch his lost matesprit, as if he was faster, as if he was stronger than the pull of the collapse of reality itself.
Solbee has to stop Psii himself, wrenching the elder psion in psionics, to keep from losing him. The ritual’s almost complete, Peixes working despite the despair, and Solbee forces the transportalizer on Psii’s wrist to get him out of here and onto the ship. He’s spent too long keeping that troll alive, he wasn’t going to stop now.
But now?
It’s too late.
He’s alone now, Peixes working frantically to thread his soul back into a physical form, for he cannot leave this crumbling hell without it. They can’t fly fast enough to escape it. The bubble is swallowed in the pull, the last two souls included, to be drawn into a world unknown.
At least the others are safe.
But what will they do now?
