Epilogue

The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars

Crucible of Stars

The darkness pressed in on Elsa like collapsing stone, smothering her. She tried to scream, but the gag turned her cry into a strangled sob. It tasted of sweat and blood.

There was dirt beneath her bare, aching feet and red-clad arms reached out from the black to grab her by the wrists. They pulled her down, arching her back painfully over the flat stone altar. She struggled against them, but the Emberguard’s grip was like steel. A dry hand caressed her forehead.

“Elsa,” Gavriel said. “My child. You have what I need.”

Elsa ached to scream at him. Whatever she possessed, she didn’t want to give to Gavriel. He had tried to kill the little Dailon baby. Elsa thought he was better than her husband, but they were the same, just hurting her to get what they wanted.

“Why take another child when I have you, my dear?” Gavriel asked. “Those parts of a child’s mind that are unformed by age can be undone by injury. Thank you, Elsa. And I suppose I must thank your husband, too.”

Elsa screamed furiously into the gag.

Another shape glided out of the darkness, luminously white as an angel. The feathers of Xartasia’s wings trailed gently along Elsa’s shoulders and bound arms. In a voice sweet and clear as spring water, the fairy princess began to sing.

Elsa didn’t understand the words, but she felt them crawling over her skin like spiders, pushing and cutting through her very being, as sharp as glittering shards of Arcadian glass.

“In the mind unmade lies power fallow,” Xartasia said, “waiting only to be harvested.”

Elsa writhed and howled in defiance, but Gavriel’s bony hand remained on her forehead. He seeped into her… No, that wasn’t it. Elsa was dissolving, her brain coming undone and he was drinking it up. She couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t put words to the horror as Xartasia unwove Elsa’s mind, picking apart her already frayed memories and thoughts into threads. And then as Gavriel gathered them up and rewove them in the darkness of his own mind.

Screaming silently, everything that was Elsa fell away into nothingness.

Eight million years ago.

Captain Rhyan expected to find darkness. Here on the edge of the galaxy, she thought there would be only blank blackness, for the emptiness of space to eat up and flatten the vastness of distance. But even here, there was pale light in the black — entire galaxies, so distant that they were single pinprick sparks barely discernible to the naked eye.

Entire galaxies just waiting to be devoured.

“We’re ready, ma’am,” a voice said behind her.

“Bring us about,” Captain Rhyan ordered, not bothering to turn away from the viewport.

Ponderously, the huge warship turned. She felt a deep regret as her vessel maneuvered to face back toward the galactic core, back toward that dense sea of stars. The captain of the VSS Pioneer had nothing but contempt for that twisted mass of glittering suns and planets. That scattering of lights and rocks had once made up a great empire, but been long since stripped of most usable resources. Work crews left behind only barren rock, incapable of supporting life much more complex than single-celled organisms.

The old galaxy was a hearth, Rhyan decided. Once it had blazed with brilliant, glorious life, but only dying embers remained now. It was time to leave. There were flames to kindle elsewhere.

A colossal ring floated in front of the ship, a massive circle constructed in eight segments, each one larger than the entire Pioneer and made of a different elemental metal. Some of the older devices were built from stone, but only the great space gates were powerful enough to transport starships.

The VSS Pioneer flew toward the Waygate. First one section and then the next began to glow, swimming all across its surface with the same swirling radiance. The Waygate lit up in red and faded to green, then a soft, permissive blue.

“They’re ready for us, ma’am.”

“What sector did the Guides select?” Rhyan asked, turning to face the pilot.

“One nineteen by two eighty-eight,” he answered, reading the number from a nearby display. “Probability is thirty-nine, sir.”

“Thirty-nine?” Rhyan asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We’re getting closer, then,” she said. “Are the ground reinforcements ready?”

“They are.”

“This galaxy is useless to us now,” Rhyan announced, turning back to the viewport and gesturing out at the stars that had served as her people’s home for eons. The captain smiled and displayed her sharp predator’s teeth. “Those worlds are only shells, broken bones hollowed of marrow. But new worlds await us. Forward!”

The VSS Pioneer vanished through the Waygate, leaving the old galaxy behind.

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