Collapse

The hum of the device, Aris's last, desperate gamble, ceased abruptly, replaced by a terrible silence. Not the quiet of peace, but the pregnant stillness before a collapsing structure gives way. Eva stood rigid, her fingers still twitching towards a non-existent control panel, the impossible vistas of the vortex seared onto her retinas. Aris knelt beside the generator, his breath coming in ragged gasps, muttering numbers that spiraled into meaningless patterns.

Then, the bulkhead behind them didn't buckle or tear. It began to *unzip*.

It started at a seam, a tiny shimmer, like heat haze seen through smeared glass. But it wasn't heat. The solid grey composite warped, the lines of its structure blurring, losing definition. It wasn't melting; it was unweaving. Fine filaments of light, the color of bruised purple and sickly green, pulled away from the metal, vibrating with silent energy. As more threads detached, the material beneath them thinned, revealing not the void of space, but shifting, kaleidoscopic geometries that pulsed and writhed.

"Aris," Eva's voice was a tight wire, strained thin by the recent horror, yet sharp with immediate danger. "The wall."

Aris didn't look up. He was tracing a pattern on the floor with a trembling finger, a pattern that wasn't there moments before. "Prime numbers… they fold inward… this is how it works…"

"Aris! Now!" Eva grabbed his arm, pulling him roughly to his feet. The disintegration was spreading, climbing the wall like a malevolent vine. The floor beneath them felt… wrong. Not unstable, but *thin*, as if the deck plating had become a sheet of paper stretched taut over a void. The air began to hum again, a low, resonant thrum that wasn't the ship's engines. It felt like the ship's *bones* vibrating in protest, or maybe in dissolution.

A section of ceiling panels above them detached, but instead of falling, they spun in place, flattening and stretching into impossibly thin ribbons of metal and light before simply ceasing to exist, leaving a patch of pure, shifting, vibrant non-space overhead. The edges of the opening were sharp, defined not by fractured metal but by the clean, abrupt transition from ship to… *other*.

"We have to move," Eva urged, dragging Aris towards the nearest functional-looking corridor. The path they'd taken moments before was now a rippling, unstable surface, the familiar grey walls weeping those same impossible colors. "It's not containing it. It's… accelerating it."

Aris stumbled, his eyes wide and unfocused. "The field... resonant frequency... it's matching the unmaking... amplify..."

"I don't care what it's doing!" Eva snapped, the fear tightening its grip around her chest. The air was growing colder, carrying that same scent of ozone and something else, something alien and terrible. Her boots slipped slightly on the floor, which now felt subtly angled, though her eyes told her it was flat. The sensory input was fighting itself, making her stomach churn.

The entire section shuddered. Not the familiar jolt of impact, but a ripple that passed through the structure like water over stone. As it passed, walls seemed to breathe, panels bulged and then recessed, and the distinct lines of the corridor wavered, threatening to lose their geometry entirely. A locker embedded in the wall to their left didn't open; it simply *unfolded*, its contents spilling out – not solid objects, but swirling dust and shimmering motes that dissipated instantly.

"Which way?" Aris finally asked, his voice distant, though he was right beside her. He was looking at the dissolving locker with a strange fascination, not fear.

"Any way that isn't *this*," Eva said, forcing herself to ignore the dissolving environment, to focus on finding a path. The entrance they'd come through was now a chaotic bloom of light, impossible to traverse. The corridor ahead pulsed with a soft, internal light, beckoning them towards more unknown horrors.

The floor beneath them felt like it was shedding layers, fine motes of grey composite flaking off and dissolving before they hit the deck. A low groan, amplified and distorted, echoed from the ship's structure, a sound that spoke of fundamental forces protesting their violation.

Eva saw a junction ahead, a chance to branch off, maybe find a stairwell, *anything* solid. "This way! Run!"

She pulled Aris, who stumbled but kept pace, his mind clearly still processing the impossible data the vortex had given him. The disintegrating air around them felt heavy, charged with a chaotic energy that prickled their skin. They needed to get out. Now. Before the ship itself ceased to be the ship and became just another part of the unmaking.

The groaning shudder that had propelled Eva and Aris down the warping corridor faded, leaving behind a silence that felt impossibly deep, as if the ship was holding its breath before its final, irreversible exhalation. It was in this terrible quiet that Jian Li was found.

He wasn't running. Wasn't clawing at bulkheads or screaming into a dead comms unit. Jian Li sat cross-legged in the center of the corridor, spine straight, hands resting palms-up on his knees. The floor beneath him was a patchwork of dissolving grey composite and patches of swirling, impossible color that looked like nebulae trapped under glass. Sections of the wall to his left were gone entirely, the space beyond not black emptiness, but a shimmering, probabilistic haze where geometry folded inwards on itself. To his right, the metal bulkhead was weeping rivulets of light that didn't drip, but instead curled upwards, coiling in the air like smoke from an unseen fire, before simply ceasing to exist.

Yet, Jian Li remained, untouched by the immediate unmaking around him. His head was tilted back slightly, eyes wide and fixed on nothing Eva could see – perhaps on the impossible patterns forming and reforming in the air, or perhaps on something only he could perceive beyond the ship’s dissolving skin. There was no terror on his face, no desperation. Only a terrifyingly serene focus.

He was speaking. The sound wasn't loud, more a resonant hum that seemed to vibrate in the air itself, independent of his vocal cords. The language was utterly alien. It wasn't the clipped, precise clicks and whistles of known xeno languages, or the chaotic static that had filled the comms. This was a language of vowel sounds held too long, consonants that felt like teeth against bone, and tonal shifts that twisted the air into discordant waves. It sounded ancient, vast, and utterly indifferent.

His gaze was vacant, yet intense. As a larger section of wall to his side crumbled inwards, dissolving with a whisper of chaotic energy, Jian Li didn't flinch. He didn't even track its disappearance with his eyes. He simply continued to speak, the strange, resonant sounds filling the eerie calm, a counterpoint to the frantic terror that must be consuming other sections of the ship. His breathing was slow, even. There was no fight in him. No desire to escape.

He was simply present, sitting in the heart of the unmaking, seemingly in communion with it. The horror wasn't his panic; it was his chilling, utter lack of it. He had surrendered. Not in defeat, but in a terrifying form of acceptance, finding a twisted 'transcendence' in the ship's demise. The dissolution of reality around him seemed to be exactly what he had been unknowingly seeking, the 'connection' he had intuited finally manifesting as a horrifying embrace of the Void.

The air around him thickened with a pressure that wasn't physical, a sense of boundless, uncaring presence settling into the space the wall had just occupied. Jian Li’s resonant hum deepened, seeming to lock into this new pressure, his voice rising slightly, though the words remained alien and incomprehensible. He was not a victim of the unmaking; he was becoming a part of it, willingly, chillingly. His sanity hadn't broken; it had simply detached from human reality and re-anchored itself somewhere else, somewhere vast and terrifyingly serene, leaving only this shell speaking the language of the void.

The floor beneath Eva's boots juddered, a sharp, metallic shriek echoing from somewhere below. Dust, fine and grey, rained from the ceiling panels overhead. Not normal dust. This felt wrong, clinging to her uniform like static, smelling faintly of burnt ozone and something metallic-sour. The polished corridor surface rippled like disturbed water, reflecting nothing but fractured lines and shadows.

*Cryo-bays. Just get to the cryo-bays.* The thought hammered in her head, stripped bare of logic, of probabilities, of command protocols. It was a desperate, animal urge: find shelter, find others, find… something that wasn't this crushing finality. Strategy was a luxury the Eidolon no longer afforded.

A section of wall to her left groaned, then seemed to peel inwards like drying paint, revealing not structural components, but a swirling, impossible kaleidoscope of colours and shapes that hurt the eyes to look at. A distorted scream, high-pitched and frantic, bled from the opening before it snapped shut with a sound like tearing steel, leaving the wall scarred and pulsing with residual energy.

"Commander!" A voice, thin with terror, came from behind her.

She spun. A young ensign, face smeared with dust and sweat, stumbled towards her, pointing a trembling finger down the corridor she'd just come from. "It's… the deck! It’s gone, Commander! Just… fell away!"

Eva grabbed his shoulder, feeling the tremor run through him. His eyes were wide, darting, seeing things she couldn't or wouldn't. "Survivors? Did you see survivors?"

"I… I don't know! It was just… empty space! And the screaming… oh God, the screaming never stops!" He broke free, scrambling past her, his panic a tangible thing that scraped against her own fraying nerves. "Gotta get to the shuttles! Gotta…" His voice trailed off as he rounded a corner, swallowed by the ship's groans and the distant, horrific symphony of collapse.

She ignored him. The shuttles were a death trap. The only chance, the *only* sliver of something akin to hope, lay in the cryo-bays. Maybe… maybe some of the crew had already made it there. Maybe they’d sealed themselves in. Maybe there was a chance, a tiny, impossible chance, they could ride this out.

The corridor ahead of her twisted abruptly. It hadn't been like that a second ago. The familiar linear path now bent at an impossible angle, the far end disappearing into a hazy grey-brown distortion. It wasn't a corner. It was a visual non-sequitur, a violation of perspective. She hesitated for half a beat, the professional commander in her screaming about structural integrity and impossible geometry, then the primal urge took over. She ran.

Her boots pounded on the unstable deck plates. The air was thick, hard to breathe, tasting of fear and the ship’s dying exhalations. Lights flickered erratically, casting monstrous, dancing shadows that seemed to writhe with a life of their own. She passed sections where the bulkheads were buckling inwards, others where panels were vibrating with impossible speed, blurring into streaks of light.

Around another bend, the scene was worse. A cluster of crew members, maybe four or five, huddled together, their faces slack with terror. One was curled on the floor, weeping silently, hands pressed tight over his ears. Another was staring fixedly at a blank wall, whispering incoherent prayers. They didn’t look at her. They didn’t react to her presence. They were lost, already pulled into the psychological abyss the Shard had created.

"Cryo-bays!" Eva yelled, her voice raw. "This way! If you can move, follow me!"

None of them responded. Their eyes remained empty, their bodies inert. She wanted to drag them, to shake them, but the ship wouldn’t wait. The air in this section felt thin, vibrating with a silent, high-pitched frequency that made her teeth ache. She had to keep moving. Leaving them was another blade twisting in her gut, but stopping would mean joining them.

She pushed past them, the weight of their despair a physical burden. The corridor began to slope downwards unexpectedly, the angle far steeper than any maintenance ramp. She braced herself against the handrail, her muscles screaming with the effort. Water, or something that *looked* like water but smelled faintly of acid, pooled in the low points, reflecting the distorted, flickering lights in sickening ways.

Then came the sounds. Not just groaning metal and tearing circuitry, but a deep, resonant hum, like a vast, unhappy organ note played somewhere deep within the ship’s core. It resonated in her bones, making her vision swim. And through it, the whispers. Not from any visible source, but seeming to originate from the very structure of the ship itself, a sibilant, multi-voiced murmur that spoke of things that had never been and should never be. It wasn’t language, not in any human sense. It was concept made sound, impossible ideas pressing against the fragile walls of her sanity. *Fold… Unmake… See…*

She stumbled, hitting a bulkhead that felt strangely soft, yielding slightly under her weight before hardening again with a metallic *clunk*. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Every turn was a gamble, every floor plate a potential trap. The ship wasn't just falling apart; it was actively transforming, becoming something else entirely, hostile and alien.

A section ahead shuddered violently. The wall to her right bulged, the metal stretching and warping into impossible convexities before snapping back with a crack, leaving behind faint, geometric etchings that hadn't been there before. She scrambled past, her breath ragged, ignoring the burning in her lungs and the fear that threatened to paralyze her. Command was gone. Strategy was a ghost. All that remained was the desperate, blind drive towards the cryo-bays, a place that might not even exist anymore, fueled by nothing but the raw, unthinking instinct to survive and to find… someone. Anyone. Even as the ship unmade itself around her, reducing everything she knew to dust and impossible geometry. The hopelessness was a physical weight, pressing down, but she kept running.

The air in the lab didn't taste right. It was metallic, yes, always had been, but now there was something else – a whisper-thin scent of ozone and something impossibly cold, like vacuum brought indoors. Aris didn't notice. His gaze was locked on the primary analysis console, specifically the residual energy readouts from the Shard interaction hours, days, a lifetime ago. Data streamed across the screen, lines of numbers flickering, dancing, refusing to resolve into anything comprehensible by conventional physics.

“Impossible,” he breathed, the word thin and dry in his throat. His fingers hovered over the holographic interface, twitching, tracing patterns in the air that mirrored the chaos on the display. “Look at this. Prime numbers… but they shouldn't *be* prime. Not in this sequence. It breaks every rule.”

He leaned closer, his nose almost touching the cool projection surface. The room around him hummed, not with the familiar drone of the life support or atmospheric processors, but with that same deep, unsettling organ note Eva had heard. It vibrated up through the deck plates, shaking the delicate calibration tools on his workbench. Dust, or what passed for dust in the Eidolon's sterile environment, shivered on the surface of monitors.

“The dimensions… they’re folded inwards,” he mumbled, a slight frown creasing his brow. He wasn't speaking to anyone, certainly not to the silent, empty lab. He was speaking to the numbers, to the impossible geometry the Shard had etched onto reality itself. “Like a Klein bottle, but… recursive. Infinite regression within a finite volume. It requires a different topology. A different *logic*.”

A section of the bulkhead to his left shimmered. The solid gray composite rippled, not like water, but like heat haze on a distant road. The edge of the monitor mounted there seemed to blur, its sharp lines softening, then reforming with a slight, almost imperceptible wrongness, as if the pixels themselves were momentarily unsure of their placement. Aris didn't flinch. His eyes were glued to the data feed.

“This isn’t just energy, Eva,” he said, the name slipping out without conscious thought, a remnant of a previous, simpler reality where Eva might actually be here, demanding an explanation he could give. “It’s… structure. Logic, but from somewhere else. It uses primes as anchors, see? But non-standard primes. It’s trying to communicate. Or perhaps, it simply *is* communication.”

The shimmering spread, consuming more of the bulkhead. It grew denser, the light within it bending and twisting in ways that hurt the eyes to look at directly. A low grinding sound, wet and heavy, emanated from the wall. Plaster dust puffed from a joint near the ceiling.

He reached out, tracing a sequence on the console. “If we can understand the prime sequence… the anchor points… we can map the folding. It’s a language. A syntax of reality itself.” His voice was rising, growing tight with a feverish intensity. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the overwhelming urge to grasp this impossible truth.

From somewhere down the corridor, faint and distorted, a voice called out. "Aris! Can you hear me? You need to move! The section is breaking down!"

Aris didn't seem to register the sound as human language. He tilted his head, listening, his gaze distant. “Noise interference,” he muttered, dismissing it. “Or... echoes. Residual patterns. The Shard imprinted... residual logic. Fascinating.”

The bulkhead to his left began to dissolve. It didn't crack or break; it simply lost coherence. Solid metal became a swirling mist of impossible colors, reds that weren't red and blues that weren't blue, mixing with the same unsettling ozone scent. The mist pulsed, like a slow, alien heartbeat.

Still, Aris watched the console. His face was pale, his eyes wide and bloodshot, reflecting the data streams dancing across the screen. “The dimensions… they’re collapsing along these non-prime vectors. It’s not destruction. It’s… transformation. Re-patterning. It’s beautiful.” A small, unsettling smile touched his lips.

The mist expanded, creeping towards him, consuming the floor, the workbench, everything it touched turning into that same swirling, impossible chaos. The voice called again, closer this time, laced with desperation. "Aris! It's Eva! Get out of there! Now!"

He didn't look up. His fingers danced over the console, desperately trying to capture the fleeting, impossible data. “Almost… almost have it. The prime sequence… it unlocks the folding algorithm. It shows you… how the universe *really* works.” His eyes glazed over, lost in the intricate, terrifying beauty of the numbers.

The mist enveloped his feet, rising up his legs. He felt a strange tingling sensation, not pain, but a loss of definition, a sense of his own boundaries blurring. He didn't pull away. He was too engrossed in the console, in the Shard's logic. The data was clearing, resolving into patterns that made no sense but felt profoundly *right* on some fundamental, non-human level.

“Yes,” he whispered, his voice thick with awe. “Yes. The folding… it’s elegant. Impossible prime… leads to… folded inwards…” His voice trailed off. The console flickered, then dissolved into the mist, the data lost forever.

Aris Thorne stood, chest deep in the swirling chaos, his arms still outstretched where the console had been. His form began to shimmer, becoming translucent around the edges, merging with the impossible colors. He was no longer looking at where the console had been, but into the mist itself, his eyes fixed on something unseen, something that existed only within the Shard's terrifying logic.

He didn't scream. He didn't fight. He simply stared into the unmaking, a faint smile still on his lips, utterly consumed by the impossible primes and the dimensions folded inwards.

The corridor buckled under Eva’s feet. Not a sudden collapse, but a nauseating undulation, like walking on a wave of hardening tar. She stumbled, catching herself on a bulkhead that felt too warm, too yielding under her gloved hand. Alarms shrieked distantly, a broken symphony of doom across the ship, but here, closer sounds dominated: the hiss of escaping atmosphere, the wet tearing of metal fibers, and a low, guttural groan that seemed to emanate from the ship’s very core.

She pushed herself forward, gasping, the air thick with ozone and the cloying, sweet scent of something burning that wasn't metal. Her lungs burned, each ragged breath doing little to clear the acrid taste from her mouth. *Cryo-bays. Got to reach the Cryo-bays.* The thought was a frantic pulse in her skull, a desperate anchor in the unraveling chaos. It was futile, she knew, a whisper of a chance clinging to a dying hope, but it was *something*. A direction. A purpose in the face of utter, soul-crushing helplessness.

Rounding a corner, she nearly fell again. The corridor ahead was different. It shimmered, the solid lines of the walls wavering like heat haze. The floor tiles weren't dissolving like they had in Aris's section, but blurring, the distinction between floor and wall and ceiling blurring into a single, terrifying smear of formless color. It wasn't a visual trick; her magnetic boots struggled for purchase on surfaces that seemed to shift beneath her.

Through the haze, she saw it. The wide double doors of the Cryo-bay entrance, or what was left of them. They were half-melted, not from heat, but from some impossible process that turned solid alloy into something akin to dripping candle wax, glowing with sickly, internal light. Beyond them, the main chamber was a scene of unimaginable devastation.

It wasn't wrecked in any way she understood. It was being *unmade*. The ranks of cryogenic pods, meant to hold the sleep of hundreds, were caught in various stages of non-existence. Some were intact, shimmering faintly, their occupants surely already lost. Others were dissolving from one end, the familiar shape of the cylinder fraying into those same impossible colors and swirling energy patterns. The transparent viewport of one pod unraveled like a thread, revealing not the peaceful face of a colonist in stasis, but a churning vortex of light where their head should be.

Eva stared, her breath catching in her throat. The gentle hum of the cryo-systems, a sound that had always symbolized life, preservation, the future, was gone. Replaced by a high-pitched keening, like strained wires snapping, and the awful, wet tearing sound amplified a thousand times. One pod, closer to her, shuddered violently, then began to *invert*, its outer shell folding inwards upon itself with a sickening crunch that wasn't metal bending, but existence protesting its own negation.

The air pressure dropped sharply. Dust, or something that looked like dust, but pulsed with faint light, billowed from the dissolving pods. Eva raised an arm to shield her face, stumbling backward. The floor behind her chose that moment to give way, not into darkness, but into that same swirling mist she'd seen engulf Aris. It reached for her boots, hungry and silent.

She scrambled back towards the corner she'd come from, her heart hammering against her ribs. There was nothing here. No one to save. The hope, that fragile, desperate tendril she'd clung to, snapped. It wasn't just gone; it was annihilated, dissolved like the people in the pods. There was no purpose left. Only the raw, unreasoning need to not be consumed.

The corridor behind her was already changing further, the walls warping, the air growing thin and cold. She was trapped in a section rapidly dissolving, cut off, alone. The keening from the Cryo-bays intensified, joined now by faint, impossible screams that weren't human, sounds that echoed the shapes twisting within the dissolving matter. Eva pressed herself against the wall, sliding down until she was huddled on the floor, watching the impossible colors creep closer. Her hands trembled. Her vision blurred, not from tears, but from the sheer visual impossibility of the scene. There was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Just the unmaking. And the crushing, absolute certainty that she had failed, completely and irrevocably.

The lights didn't just die; they *failed*. Not with a simple click and darkness, but with a stuttering sequence of blinding surges, colors that shouldn't exist bleeding through the lenses – violent purples, screaming greens, impossible oranges – before winking out section by section, leaving pockets of absolute blackness punctuated by the weak glow of failing emergency strips. A klaxon shrieked, a single, sustained note that quickly warped, dropping in pitch, stuttering like a broken recording, then dissolving into a guttural moan that vibrated in your teeth.

In a corridor that had recently decided it preferred to curve upwards and to the left simultaneously, Aris Thorne knelt, his fingers tracing a pattern on the bulkhead that was dissolving even as he touched it. His eyes, wide and fixed, were on something only he could see. He muttered, "No, no, no... the primes... they *are* infinite... but the geometry... it resolves to a non-finite set... the manifold is *closed* but unbounded... how? How can it be... both? Both simultaneously... a zero-sum in the *structure*..." The air here tasted of static and ozone. Sparks, thick and blue, didn't fall; they *unwound* from severed conduits, resolving into impossible, ephemeral shapes before vanishing. The floor beneath him rippled, not like water, but like paper being crumpled slowly, edges blurring into faint, shimmering static. He didn't seem to notice the physical changes, lost in the collapsing landscape of his own mind. The ship's core systems, the logical framework he had always relied on, were broadcasting their death throes, not as data streams, but as pure, unadulterated *nonsense*. "System integrity compromised," the AI voice echoed from a nearby, sparking comm panel, its tone perfectly flat, "Probability of atmospheric retention: negative fifty-two percent. Recommend immediate... immediate... *singing the stars backwards*. Warning: reality deviation detected in... in... *the taste of silence*." The voice cut out, replaced by a sound like grinding glass that wasn't there, layered over the amplified shriek of protesting metal. Aris remained, eyes fixed on the dissolving wall, his own existence starting to feel thin at the edges.

Miles away, near where the Cryo-bays had been, Eva Rostova was on her hands and knees, clawing at a section of deck plating that hadn't dissolved yet. Her earlier despair had sharpened into a desperate, animal drive to escape the immediate unmaking. The air was frigid, thinner here. The keening was closer now, a chorus of impossible notes that scraped against her sanity. She heard screams, too, distant and then closer, then abruptly silenced, swallowed by the groaning, tearing sounds of the ship coming apart. "AI, status report!" she yelled, her voice hoarse, the comm panel on her wrist sparking uselessly. "Eidolon, respond! Damage report!" The silence was her only answer, save for the ship's own dying cacophony. A section of the ceiling overhead began to bubble and swell, the metal stretching and warping like overheated plastic, but without the heat. It folded in on itself with a wet, sucking sound, revealing a brief glimpse of raw, churning energy before sealing over again with a sickening thud. Eva scrambled backward, her hands tearing on the warped metal. The floor behind her vibrated violently, a deep, resonant thrumming that went straight to her bones. It felt like the ship was sighing its final, ragged breath. She had nowhere left to run within these walls. Every direction offered only more of the tearing, the unmaking, the impossible sounds.

In a different, increasingly distorted section, where corridors branched off at impossible angles and led into sudden, silent voids, Jian Li sat cross-legged on the floor. He was surrounded by the visual equivalent of static – the air shivered, lines blurred, and every surface seemed to be on the verge of becoming something else entirely. His face was serene, a faint, unsettling smile playing on his lips. He spoke softly, not to anyone, but to the space around him. "Yes... the unveiling... the true form... not light, not dark... but the space between the notes... the song they sing is ending... and *this* is the beginning..." The ship’s death rattle was a symphony to him now, the grinding metal the tuning of impossible instruments, the keening the voice of beings beyond comprehension. A patch of wall beside him dissolved into a swirling nebula of colors that didn't belong in this universe. He reached out a hand, not in fear, but in greeting. His fingers passed through the energy field, and for a moment, his hand glowed with an internal light, the bones visible beneath translucent flesh, before snapping back to normal. He laughed softly, a sound utterly devoid of humor. The structure around him groaned, a sound like tectonic plates shifting, then shearing apart. The floor began to slant steeply, pulling him towards a section where the very air seemed to thicken and darken. He made no move to resist.

The AI's voice returned, a ghost in the machine, but now a child's voice, tinny and terrified. "Hull breach... in the garden... the flowers are screaming... they don't like the edges..." It dissolved into a stream of numbers that meant nothing, followed by a sound like laughter and weeping played at the same time. Then silence. Permanent. The last remnants of logic gone. The lights flickered one final, violent time across the ship, then died, leaving only the unstable glow of the anomaly's unmaking. The sounds of structural failure became the only language, a chorus of tearing, groaning, and snapping that built to an unbearable pitch, a final, horrific crescendo of the Eidolon's end. Aris, Eva, Jian Li – scattered, isolated, each facing the unmaking in their own way, their immediate surroundings dissolving into the cosmic horror. The ship was no more. Only the Shard remained, and the terrifying, impossible space it created.