Time moved strangely in the pod.
Without the normal rhythms of day and night, without the comforting routine of shifts and meals and human voices, minutes stretched like hours and hours compressed into heartbeats. Lyron tried to keep track at first—counting his breaths, watching the chronometer in the corner of the main screen—but eventually, he gave up and let himself drift in temporal limbo.
His stomach had moved past growling into a deeper, constant ache. Two days since his last meal, and now this. They'd even removed the emergency rations from the pod, he'd discovered an hour in. Checked every storage compartment, opened every sealed drawer. Nothing. Not a single nutrient bar or water packet.
As if abandoning him in space wasn't cruelty enough, they'd made sure he'd suffer every second of consciousness before the end.
And yet…
Lyron's hand moved to his chest, pressing against the suit's hard shell. Beneath the layers of fabric and polymer and his own skin, his heart beat strong and steady. Too strong, perhaps. Despite the starvation, despite the dehydration, despite everything, his body felt… alive. More than alive. Energized in a way that made no biological sense.
The weakness was there, certainly—a hollow feeling in his limbs, a slight tremor in his fingers—but it felt like a distant thing, an echo of what true starvation should be. Like his cells were burning on some fuel source he couldn't name.
Strange. But then again, dying alone in the void was already strange enough that a little physiological anomaly barely registered.
He'd settled into a kind of meditation, eyes half-closed, breathing slowly and deliberately to conserve oxygen, when the screen caught his attention.
Camera Five—the starboard bow feed—showed something impossible.
At first, Lyron thought it was a sensor glitch. A corrupted pixel cluster, or perhaps cosmic radiation interfering with the camera's circuitry. But as he leaned forward, squinting at the display, his breath caught in his throat.
A line.
Vertical. Absolute. Impossibly perfect in its geometry.
It hung in the vacuum approximately forty thousand kilometers to starboard, bisecting a particularly beautiful red giant star that Lyron had been unconsciously admiring for the past subjective eternity. The line was not merely dark—it was absence. A cut in reality itself, a place where space simply… stopped.
On either side of the line, faint distortions rippled through the starfield, as if he were viewing the cosmos through heat shimmer despite the absolute cold of space.
For a long, breathless moment, nothing happened.
The line simply existed, a two-dimensional impossibility in a three-dimensional universe. Lyron's mind raced through everything he'd learned about space phenomena during his basic training aboard the Herald. Gravitational lensing? No—wrong shape. Quantum fluctuation? Those didn't last more than Planck-time fragments. An Einstein-Rosen bridge? Theoretical, and certainly not something that looked like a knife wound in the fabric of space.
Then, with a silent, grinding inevitability that Lyron felt not in his ears—sound couldn't travel in vacuum—but deeper, in his teeth, in his bones, in the marrow where his body met his soul, the line began to open.
Like jaws. Like something vast and ancient waking from dreamless sleep.
The edges were jagged, crystalline, as if reality itself had been shattered rather than cut. They spread apart slowly, revealing… revealing…
Nothing. At first, only darkness filled the widening gap—a blackness somehow deeper than the space around it, a hungry void that seemed to pull at his perception.
Then light.
A single wisp of radiant blue flickered into existence at the center of the expanding maw. It danced, delicate as a candle flame, beautiful as dying starlight. For three of Lyron's hammering heartbeats, it remained alone—a solitary note in the cosmic symphony.
Then it began to grow.
The wisp stretched, elongated, split into multiple strands that swirled around each other in patterns that hurt to watch—geometries that seemed to exist in more than three dimensions, shapes that his brain couldn't quite process. They spiraled inward, converging on a central point, faster and faster until they blurred into a ring of pure luminescence.
An iris. That's what it resembled. A vast, cosmic eye opening in the void, its pupil an abyss of churning shadow, its iris a vortex of living light that spun with terrible purpose.
The blue radiance expanded further, flooding the jagged wound in space until the entire opening blazed with cold fire. It reminded Lyron of the bioluminescent algae blooms he'd seen once on Terrahold III's southern ocean—the same ethereal quality, the same sense of watching something alive and utterly alien.
But this was no algae. This was something else. Something beyond his comprehension.
The air in his pod—recycled and processed—suddenly felt different. Charged. As if an invisible current ran through it, raising the hair on his arms, making his skin prickle with electricity he couldn't name. The temperature hadn't changed—his suit's sensors confirmed that—yet he felt cold in a way that transcended mere physics.
And there was sound.
Impossible sound, traveling through vacuum, bypassing his ears entirely to resonate directly in his skull. A music that wasn't music. A frequency that spoke to something fundamental in him, something older than consciousness or language. It called to him. Sang to him. Drew him forward with irresistible gravitational poetry.
Lyron realized, with a detachment born of shock, that his pod was moving.
Not from any thruster activation—those remained disabled. This was something else. The anomaly was pulling him in, warping space around itself, creating a current in the fabric of reality that his tiny vessel couldn't resist.
"What…"
The word escaped his lips, small and inadequate, immediately swallowed by the pod's cramped interior. His hands moved to the control panel, fingers flying over buttons he knew were useless. The thrusters were dead. The maneuvering systems were locked. He was a leaf in a cosmic river, being swept inexorably toward that beautiful, terrible eye.
The pod's systems flickered.
Red warning lights bloomed across every display, accompanied by a cacophony of error chirps that his suit muffled but couldn't eliminate. The camera feeds showing external views began to corrupt—static crawling across the images like digital maggots consuming the visuals from the edges inward.
Camera Six died first, the feed showing the aft section dissolving into meaningless noise.
Then Camera Three, the port side view.
Camera Two, Four, One—all gone in rapid succession, leaving only Camera Five. Only the forward view. Only the eye.
Closer now. So much closer.
Lyron could see details that shouldn't be visible at this distance. Fractal patterns in the blue light, spiraling deeper and deeper into infinite complexity. Shadows moving in the darkness beyond, vast shapes that might have been tentacles or might have been continents or might have been the dreams of dying stars.
The eye stared back at him.
And he felt, with absolute certainty, that it was aware of him. That whatever intelligence or force or cosmic mechanism had opened this wound in space, it knew he was coming. Perhaps it had been waiting. Perhaps it had called specifically to him, across light-years and probability, to this exact moment in this exact place.
His pod accelerated.
Slowly at first, then faster, pulled by forces that made gravity look like a gentle suggestion. The seat restraints bit into his shoulders. His heart hammered against his ribs. Every instinct screamed at him to do something—to fight, to escape, to rage against this impossible fate.
But what could he do? He was powerless. Helpless. A mote of dust in a hurricane.
So Lyron did the only thing he could.
He reached out with trembling fingers and pressed a button on the control panel. Camera Five's feed expanded to fill the entire main screen, giving him an unobstructed view of his approaching doom.
Then, with hands that had written a hundred poems about beauty and death and the spaces between, he leaned back in his seat.
And he watched.
---
"No. No, no, no."
The final camera feed vanished—dissolving into a gray void of dead pixels—and Lyron's carefully maintained calm shattered like glass.
His hands flew across the control panel, stabbing at buttons with increasing desperation. Reboot the sensors. Reroute power from life support. Emergency override—maybe, maybe if he could just get something working, some way to see, some way to know—
Nothing.
Every screen showed the same message in cold, matter-of-fact red letters:
SYSTEM FAILURE - EXTERNAL SENSORS OFFLINE
His heart threatened to crack his sternum with its violent hammering. Breath came in short, gasping bursts that fogged the inside of his helmet. The walls of the pod, already claustrophobic, seemed to contract around him, pressing in, squeezing, suffocating—
Stop.
The word cut through his panic like a blade.
Stop. Breathe. Think.
Lyron forced himself to inhale slowly—five counts in, hold for three, seven counts out. A meditation technique his mother had taught him during the anxiety-soaked nights before he'd left Terrahold III. For chasing dreams, she'd said, required learning how to master fear.
In. Hold. Out.
In. Hold. Out.
His pulse gradually slowed. The crushing pressure in his chest eased, just slightly. He could think again.
What did it matter if the cameras were dead? He was still moving—he could feel it in the subtle g-forces pressing him back into his seat. Still accelerating toward the anomaly, pulled by forces that made mockery of human engineering.
So what if he was blind? He'd been dying anyway. Twelve hours of oxygen, alone in the void, waiting for a rescue that would never come. At least this… this was interesting. At least his death would be unique. Not many people could claim they'd been swallowed by a cosmic anomaly.
A laugh bubbled up from his throat—slightly unhinged, edged with hysteria, but genuine nonetheless. Here he was, a farmer's son from a backwater agro-world, hurtling toward the unknown like some hero from the old myths his mother used to recite while tending the fields.
'Maybe,' he thought with dark humor, 'I'll at least make an interesting ghost story.'
The pod suddenly lurched.
Velocity spiked so dramatically that Lyron's vision momentarily grayed at the edges. He felt himself pressed deeper into the seat as acceleration built and built and built—crushing force that made breathing difficult, that turned his arms to lead, that painted spots of darkness across his already-compromised sight.
Faster.
The word had lost all meaning. He was beyond fast, beyond velocity, beyond the comfortable physics of thrust and trajectory. Whatever the anomaly was doing to space around him, it had nothing to do with conventional movement. This was something else. Something fundamental.
Reality twisted.
There was no other word for the sensation. The pod—and Lyron within it—seemed to fold in on itself, to exist simultaneously in multiple states, multiple places. He felt stretched thin as paper and compressed to the density of neutron-degenerate matter, both at once, neither truly.
The universe spun.
Or perhaps he spun and the universe held still. Orientation became meaningless. Up was sideways was down was nowhere. His inner ear screamed contradictions at his brain, sending cascading signals that made no sense, that couldn't be reconciled with any model of three-dimensional space.
Nausea rose, sharp and immediate. Lyron's stomach clenched, trying to rebel, but there was nothing in it to expel. Just hollow, grinding emptiness.
The world blurred.
Colors that shouldn't exist bled through his closed eyelids. Sounds that weren't sounds—or were too sound, were hyperreal echoes of echoes—reverberated through his skull. Time felt elastic, moments stretching into eternities and eternities compressing into instants.
Through it all, Lyron remained… calm.
Not peaceful. Not accepting. But calm in the way someone standing at the edge of an abyss might be calm, having already decided to leap. This was death. Or transcendence. Or damnation. Whatever it was, fighting wouldn't change it. Panic wouldn't stop it.
So he experienced it.
Every impossible second. Every violation of natural law. Every moment of his consciousness being torn apart and reconstructed by forces that cared nothing for human fragility.
He was a poet, after all. Even dying, especially dying, he would witness. Would feel. Would remember, even if there was nothing left to do the remembering.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the chaos stopped.
The pod jerked to a halt—not gradually, not with deceleration curves and compensatory thrust, but immediately. One instant: infinite velocity. The next: absolute stillness. The whiplash should have snapped his neck, should have liquified his organs, should have killed him instantly.
Somehow, it didn't.
Lyron was thrown forward against his restraints, momentum desperate to continue where the pod had stopped. The straps bit deep into his shoulders and chest, holding him fast. His head snapped down, helmet striking the control panel with a hollow thud that rang through his skull.
White light exploded across his vision.
Pain—sharp, immediate, shocking—lanced through his temples. The world tilted sideways, consciousness slipping like water through his fingers. He felt himself falling, though he was still strapped in place. Felt darkness rising to meet him, vast and welcoming and final.
His last thought, before the blackness claimed him, was of Lana's emerald eyes.
And then there was nothing.
Nothing at all.