The signal echoed through the Helix Storm—a soundless resonance that bypassed equipment and struck straight into the minds of the crew. It was like hearing your own name whispered by a voice that didn't exist. A call from something buried beneath all realities.
Return.
Elara stood on the command deck, jaw tight, gaze fixed on the sphere suspended in the void. Behind her, the crew worked in tense silence. No alarms, no alerts—because the systems couldn't even detect the threat. It was beyond threat. Beyond definition.
Lira sat hunched over the Drift Core readouts. "I've mapped every signal variant. This isn't a frequency. It's a concept—being broadcast through quantum root-code. It's rewriting cause… before effect happens."
"Like rewriting time?" Astra asked, breathless.
"Worse," Lira replied. "Rewriting why time exists."
Korr growled. "I've faced cosmic tyrants, void dragons, paradox storms. This is different. This… feels like standing in a graveyard before the bodies are even buried."
They needed answers.
So Elara made the call.
"We're sending a probe."
The crew went still.
"Just a drift-dive echo, calibrated with multi-layered filtration. We won't engage. Just… observe."
Astra prepped the echo-probe. It wasn't physical—more a reflection of the ship, rendered from stabilized imagination and anchored in Kael's remaining imprint. It blinked once… and vanished into the sphere.
What came back wasn't data.
It was music.
Soft. Empty. Perfect.
A song hummed through the systems, harmonies that defied emotional boundaries. Elara felt warmth, sorrow, bliss, and despair all in a single note. Her knees buckled.
"It's beautiful," she whispered.
Lira screamed. "TURN IT OFF!"
Too late.
The lights dimmed.
All screens flickered, showing brief flashes—images that had no logic or sequence.
A child aging backward into oblivion. A universe with no stars. Kael, standing at the edge of a chasm, his face unreadable. An eye of infinite depth opening beneath the known multiverse.
And then…
A choir.
Thousands—no, millions—of voices singing the same note. Not with joy or purpose.
But in resignation.
"The Null Choir," Astra said, trembling. "I've seen mentions in the deepest time-seer archives. They're not people. They're… endings. Living conclusions."
Elara stared at the screen, where the note still pulsed. "Endings of what?"
"Of everything. When stories are done—when universes have no more to give—these things… come. They don't feed. They don't conquer. They simply erase. Not out of malice. Just… because."
Korr stepped forward. "Then we stop them."
But the moment the words left his mouth, the sphere cracked.
A seam of non-color split across its surface, and out came light—no, anti-light—that sucked the meaning from everything it touched.
The Drift itself convulsed.
Across the multiverse, minor echoes began to vanish. Songs unfinished. Lives unremembered. Fragments turned to static.
Kael had silenced the war between extremes.
But in doing so, he had awakened something older than conflict.
Not a villain.
Not a god.
A truth.
Stories end.
And the Null Choir had begun to sing the final verse.