Chapter 4 — Stardust and Despair

The instant the dark law settled, Tartarus was erased from the universe.

Not an explosion. Not a collapse. It was something more total than physical destruction — the entire world's existence was severed along the roots of time and space by a black higher-dimensional law-thread precise to the particle, leaving not even debris behind.

The wasteland, the barracks, the mine-frames, the old city in the distance that had fed three generations — all turned to imperceptible stardust in the same instant, swept up by the tide of annihilation and scattered soundlessly into the Void. The crooked stars Aira had drawn on the bulkhead; the dried tobacco bundles and antifreeze canisters hanging under old Barnaby's eaves; the rusted hammer in the abandoned barracks — all became an unnoticeable fleck of powder within the stardust.

No one had time to say goodbye.

No fire, no great noise — only a near-tender, cruel, absolute quiet.

Elias had not even seen how the light left — one moment the corpse-pale glow of the core filled his eyes; the next, even the physical concept of "corpse-pale" had been forcibly withdrawn from around him, leaving only an absolute, directionless stillness and void.

Elias was still alive.

He knelt on ground that no longer existed, cradling the sister who was vanishing.

The black higher-dimensional law had passed through every inch of his flesh and soul. Yet the very ruler that measured the continuity of life, having measured him, had miraculously let him pass — his soul's wavelength, by sheer physical accident, had happened to fall outside the death-frequency the dark law erased. He was like a band of radio static that never found the right channel, dismissed by the black law as useless interference and forced through.

He was the only survivor on all of Tartarus.

Yet he would rather never have survived.

"Aira? Aira!!"

Elias looked down, trembling.

The warmth in his arms was fading fast. His sister's body had become a semi-transparent phantom, like an ice sculpture being blown apart by the deep-space wind. Yet her icy little hands still stubbornly, with the last of her strength, pressed something into his palm.

It was a broken star-core pendant.

Only half of it — at the break, a pinpoint of blue-grey light flickered, not yet extinguished. It was the last remnant of Tartarus's core-energy; the only keepsake his sister had torn from her own chest and pressed into his hand before the darkness swallowed her wholly.

The moment the pendant met Elias's palm, he heard his sister laugh — very softly, as she did when he teased her: terrified to the bone, yet putting on a brave face for her brother.

"Brother… keep it safe."

Those were the last faint words she left in the world.

The next second, those cool little hands loosed his coat-collar entirely, and she became shining stardust scattered to the winds, silently lost in the lightless Void whose direction he could no longer name.

"Aira——!!"

Elias loosed a scream torn from his very bowels — but the black Void would not even grant him an echo. He tightened his arms by instinct, and caught only a cold, hollow stillness.

The grief of loss struck like a red-hot iron, searing from his chest down into his bones. But what erupted first, deep in his soul, was a hatred gone utterly feral.

Hatred for the black higher-dimensional law that had ground his sister and his home into stardust.

Hatred for the high-and-mighty Divine Court that could not be bothered even to lower its gaze.

He did not know which exalted god had dealt that fatal blow, nor why he alone had slipped outside the erasure-frequency. He only knew that this world, while he still lived, had taken everything else from him — and so long as he drew breath, he must remember it.

Remember the mountain-heavy weight of divine majesty. Remember old Barnaby's final cry underground. Remember his sister's cool little hands in the moment before she scattered. He would carry these into the blind spot, into every day of the life remaining to him, until they were no longer memory but part of his very bones — the reason his hands would never tremble when, one day, he raised a blade against the heavens.

He swore a blood-oath: so long as he lived, he would make whoever dealt the blow know that on this wasteland world they had struck off like garbage, there had once been a child who called someone brother, there had once been a life that, in its despair, cried out in defiance.

When the dark tide receded, only he remained in the Void.

Elias clutched the bloodied half-pendant to his heart, and let the physical afterwash carry his body, drifting slowly toward the edge the Astrolabe's gaze could not reach.

It was a dark corner forgotten by every orbital path and every fate — the astral blind spot.

The LinBoo Astrolabe recorded the turning of every star in the galaxy, every karma tithe, every death that ought to come — yet it could not reckon the existence here. Elias slid, with the ripples of gravity, deeper into the dead angle of the blind spot; his consciousness flickered between extreme cold and extreme pain.

The half-pendant against his heart pulsed blue-grey, now bright, now dim, as if guarding the unextinguished spark of his soul.

Light-years away, the Astrolabe in the highest Sanctum dimmed for a single beat.

Astra stood beside the empty seat; the threads of light in her fingertips went wholly dark. She gazed at the spot on the ledger where that world had been struck out, and could not move for a long time. Umbra, cold, turned and melted into the shadow at the hall's depths; the black law-threads closed behind her like a wound no one would be permitted to reopen.

Neither of them noticed that on the world they had erased, a mortal boy who had slipped outside the frequency of death was drifting, through the fissure the law had overlooked, into deep space.

Beyond the blind spot, the Astrolabe turned on as before, neither a beat too many nor too few.

It did not know that in the very gap it had just struck out, a boy was grinding a half-broken star-core in his fist, honing his hatred into a ferocious blade that would never be quenched.

By the time it finally noticed, that fissure would no longer be a fissure — but a gaping chasm that tore the Divine Court asunder.