After leaving Radae's star system, Verlin made his way to Earth's solar system. The excess energy no longer clung to his cells and had been radiated away, compelling his body to return its natural stature. Although he was now much stronger than his previous peak, it was nowhere near the exaggerated power he felt from diving into the core of a star.
Verlin didn't slow down once he reached the Solar system, he had a clear direction.
Earth.
He had seen it before he arrived—a pale, gray-brown sphere where blue and green used to be, wrapped in a thin haze of ash-choked atmosphere that never seemed to fully settle. No white cloud cover drifting in familiar patterns. No visible oceans catching sunlight the way he remembered. Just a dull, scarred husk hanging in the same orbit it always had, indifferent to what it used to be.
Debris ringed the planet in loose, scattered bands—remnants of the crater's own ejection, hundreds of millions of fragments still locked in unstable orbits, some no larger than gravel, others the size of buildings. Every so often, one lost what little orbital stability it had and streaked back down through the ash-thick sky, a small, meaningless impact added to a surface that had long since stopped being able to register the difference.
Even in death, it kept being struck by the aftermath of a battle that ended 8 years ago, seemingly never given a moment of peace.
The moon orbited beside it, and that too had changed.
Deep fissures ran across its surface in branching patterns, some wide enough to swallow small cities, cutting through craters and highlands alike without regard for what had been there before. Whole sections of the surface looked subtly wrong—tilted, displaced, as though the moon's crust had been struck hard enough to shift without fully breaking apart.
He descended through the atmosphere. It was thick with ash and sulfur now, nothing like the air he remembered from his time here—the nitrogen-oxygen mix long since fouled beyond anything a human lung could survive. He passed through it quickly, making his way toward the one place he needed to see first.
The crater.
He found it exactly where his memory told him it would be. Three thousand kilometers of shattered, fractured earth, curving away in every direction, still venting the same steam from the same
thousands of points along its depth as it had a month ago, when he'd first laid eyes on it, disoriented and searching for answers.
There was nothing left to search for now. He could see everything—every fracture, every vent, all of it, all at once.
That didn't make it easier to look at.
His senses were sharper now than they'd ever been, sharp enough to read the crater the way an investigator might read a crime scene—except at a level of detail no investigator could ever match. The fracture patterns spreading out from the center all pointed to one thing: an explosion that started from a single point, not something that had struck the planet from outside. And the faint traces of energy still lingering in the rock, eight years old but still readable to him, weren't Radae's. They matched his own—the same golden energy he'd felt pouring out of his own body just recently.
There was no ambiguity left.
The crater was his doing. Entirely his.
He'd known it, in some form, since the day he'd woken up in the mantle. But knowing it and confirming it—reading it directly out of the bones of the planet itself—were different things. The confirmation didn't make him feel worse. He didn't think that was possible.
After a long moment, his gaze pulled away from the crater and moved outward, across the rest of the planet.
It was hard to put into words the scale of what he found.
Ash-gray plains where forests had been. Ocean basins reduced to cracked, dry salt flats in some regions, while elsewhere entire coastlines had drowned beneath risen, acidified seas. Mountain ranges leveled into rubble fields stretching for hundreds of kilometers. Not a single structure remained standing that could be recognized as something built by human hands—no cities, no ruins with distinguishable outlines, nothing but scoured ground and settled ash, the way a wound looks long after the bleeding has stopped and the scar tissue has taken over completely.
Even after the Coalition had informed him that there was no sentient life left, deep down he had hoped that something worth saving might have survived
The only living things he could find anywhere on the planet existed deep beneath the remaining oceans—simple organisms clustered around a handful of surviving hydrothermal vents, tiny and blind and utterly indifferent to the catastrophe that had reshaped the world above them. No fish. No coral. No plant life feeding the base of any food chain. Just isolated colonies of extremophiles, clinging to existence in the one environment his destruction hadn't fully reached.
Even from a glance, it was obvious they wouldn't last. Without a functioning ecosystem above them—without light, without nutrients cycling down from a living surface—their survival was only temporary. A few more decades, maybe.
Then even that would be gone.
Earth would be, in every sense that mattered, completely and finally dead.
Verlin withdrew his gaze as he left the planet.
For a moment, he thought of terraforming Earth.
But for who?
He thought of leaving the solar system.
But where would he go?
He had nowhere to return to.
And nowhere to go.
So, as he had done whenever he lacked the power to face what was in front of him,
He turned to the sun.
He settled onto an insignificant meteorite about 2 million kilometers from the surface of the star. There was nothing left here and just being here, the painfully fresh memories seemed to overlap with reality. But he didn't know what else to do.
His eyes peered into the core of the star.
He watched hydrogen fuse together under the immense pressure and heat, releasing enormous amounts of energy with every reaction.
He could see the tiny particles produced by those reactions racing outward. Some, like neutrinos, passed through the Sun almost completely unhindered, escaping into space nearly as fast as light.
The light was different.
Photons born in the core couldn't simply travel straight to the surface. They were constantly absorbed and scattered by the dense plasma around them, taking an unimaginably long time to work their way outward.
What began in the core could take thousands of years to finally reach the surface.
For Verlin, every step of that journey was visible.
The continuous process was no longer novel to him, but regardless he continued to watch, remaining motionless.
At times his thoughts would stray to names. Voices he'd caught once, years ago, back when he lived in the Arctic and used to listen in on Chloe from thousands of kilometers away, just to check that she was alright. Her voice had a specific frequency, a specific cadence he could isolate out of everything else on the planet without even trying.
Everyone else had just been noise in the way.
Now those discarded voices came back anyway—fragments of conversations that had meant nothing to him at the time, names spoken by people he'd never bothered to place a face to, entire
lives he'd heard and filtered out in the same half-second, because they weren't who he was listening to.
Other times it was Chloe. Desna. The people he had actually failed.
Thoughts of what he could have done differently. If he hadn't held back from the start. If he hadn't covered his eyes when Radae aimed the dagger at his heart. If he had the willpower to stay conscious in his first attempt at removing the dagger.
He let the thoughts sit for a while, unresolved, before pulling his focus back to the star—before any of them could end up forming into something he'd have to actually feel.
Time passed. He didn't count it.
Days folded into weeks, weeks into months. The star's light didn't change. Neither did he. The same reactions repeated at the core, the constant fragments of voices rose and were pushed back down, the same absence sat where relief was supposed to be.
At some point, without deciding to think it, the thought simply arrived.
I can't keep living like this.
It came flat. No despair attached to it, just a conclusion, arrived at the same quiet way he used to calculate trajectories, except this time there was no trajectory to calculate. Just an ending he hadn't chosen to reach and didn't know what to do with now that he had.
His expression didn't change.
For the first time in months, his eyes left the core of the star.
He turned outward instead, into the dark between systems, searching without knowing what he was searching for. Just anywhere that wasn't here.
Something caught his attention at the edge of his vision—wrong in a way that took his mind a moment to process.
A patch of space where the stars behind it weren't where they should have been.
Their light curved around an invisible point, stretched into thin arcs and distorted rings that seemed to bend around a darkness deeper than the surrounding night. There was no glow at its center. No surface. Nothing to reflect the light that passed near it.
A black hole.
It was only twelve light years away.
Verlin looked at it for a long moment.
Then he rose from the meteorite, and without deciding to, without any plan beyond the pull of it, he flew toward the dark.
Verlin didn't want to experience the journey.
Twelve light years of empty space between himself and the only place that felt like it might finally offer something other than the same repeating thoughts. He'd had enough time. More than enough.
So he did the only thing he could.
He slowed his own mind down.
Not his body—his body kept moving at the impossible same speed. But his thoughts, his consciousness, the internal clock that had been counting every unbearable second since he'd left the star—he pushed that down. Dulled it. Let his own perception of time crawl to less than a fraction of what it had been, the same way his senses could sharpen to catch a heartbeat from across a planet, he could blunt them just as easily to skip past what he didn't want to experience.
From the outside, had anyone been watching, the flight would have taken ten hours.
From where Verlin was, it took six seconds.
Six seconds of stars smearing past in streaks of light he barely registered. Six seconds of hollow, mechanical motion, his mind deliberately kept blank, refusing to let a single thought take shape long enough to hurt him.
It was the first relief he'd felt in months.
Not because anything had changed.
But because, for six seconds, there had been nothing to feel.
Then the darkness ahead of him stopped being distant.
It filled his vision entirely
The stars around it stretched and curved across his field of view, their light bending around the invisible mass at the center.
Verlin's thoughts snapped back to their normal speed.
He could see the black hole now.
There was no glowing disk surrounding it. No brilliant surface. Just an absence where light disappeared, bordered by the warped image of the universe behind it.
Verlin stared into it.
In truth, he wasn't sure if the singularity could actually kill him.
But he had no reason not to try.
Verlin stopped resisting its pull.
At first, there was almost nothing to feel. His body simply drifted forward, the blackness growing larger in front of him as the surrounding stars warped farther and farther out of place.
Then the pull intensified.
The closer he came, the stranger the stars became.
Light from behind the black hole bent around him and entered his eyes. Stars that should have been hidden appeared around the edges of the darkness, their light stretched and distorted by the immense gravity.
Verlin watched them without interest.
Then he saw something.
His eyes narrowed.
Among the distorted stars was a distant star system.
A planet orbited its star, blue and white beneath the scattered light.
And above it—
A massive vessel hung in orbit.
Verlin stopped.
His eyes remained fixed on the distant image.
The ship was unmistakable.
A Coratian mothership.
Looking at the mothership, Verlin couldn't help recalling one of the earlier exchanges he had with Radae. The god had mentioned an agreement with 'another mortal', one that involved a drop of his own blood.
Given that before meeting Radae, the only interaction with extraterrestrial life he'd had were with beings associated with the Coratian empire. Not to mention, the Coratians already had knowledge on the enhanced humans.
Although the Coalition had proclaimed Coratian technology had advanced by leaps and bounds over the past few years. After facing off against a being like Radae, he no longer took any civilization seriously.
In truth, he cared little about the details of his blood, but if the reason Radae was able to suddenly find earth, had something to do with the Coratians...
Verlins eyes squinted slightly. His gaze lingered on the singularity for a moment before saying in his head, 'The black hole isn't going anywhere'
Verlin turned away from the singularity, gravity resisting him for an instant before releasing its hold entirely.
Then he flew toward the distant light of the mothership.