Five hours, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty seconds.I didn't use a clock to measure the seconds, but rather by the excruciatingly small cracks that appeared in my own soul. Sitting on the Apex Throne was no longer endurance, it was a thousand cuts of a trillion paper cuts. The infinite pane of dimensional glass that held the Outer Dark off of me was spiderwebbing, and every time a fracture opened, the Throne would rip another piece of my soul out of me to fill the crack with raw starlight.My chin and Event Horizon's breastplate were all dried with blood. My sight was turned red.However, with the absolute omniscience of the Zenith circuit, I could see the muster.The clear, airless white sky above the Zenith Gate had been marred. A hundred different cosmic armadas, chaos and beauty. The Cosmic Council had met the deadline. The jagged magma-ships, the synchronized hard-light dreadnoughts, and the changing iridescent warships of the Feathered Sovereign floated with us, and the pitch-bla

The Zenith Stratum was a graveyard of mathematics.I was on the broken rim of the Apex Spire, gazing out over the endless devastation of the Heavens' highest sphere. The Celestial Emperor's sterile, white-gold perfection had been lost and he had been ruthlessly maintaining it for millennia. It was now covered with a chaotic asteroid field of pulverized marble, drifting aimlessly through a sky that was rapidly draining its golden light into the dead vacuum of space.The three-hundred-mile hole in the universal barrier was sealed by the rotting, black, absolute corpse of the Octahedron above them.A Zenith drop-ship, heavily modified, tore its way through the debris field and hovered near the broken glass of the throne room. Before the ship could even dock, Maya jumped from the open ramp, her Tier 7 tech-meridians buzzing with frenetic and exhausted energy.“Boss,” she breathed, setting her boots down first on the broken celestial glass. She pulled up a holographic interface from her wr

The obsidian dreadnought didn't fly. It plummeted.We had no time for a measured, majestic passage of a star ship. As soon as the hefty ramp closed behind us, I fed the localized gravity of my internal universe straight into the dreadnought's uncloaked warp manifold. A holographic map of the dimensional tree was created, and Maya didn't draw a course, but rather a straight, vertical line down the tree.“Inertial dampeners are a hundred and fifty percent!” The engines roared, and Maya was yelling over the noise as she poured starlight into her hands and created a command console. “Boss, if we get hit by a patch of thick cosmic junk at this speed, the hull will be atomized!I ordered, "Keep the nose down, Maya," standing stiff at the primary viewport, pitch-black Event Horizon armor absorbing the frantic, flashing red warning lights of the bridge.The Upper Realm was a jumbled mass of violet and gold static beyond the screen. In the blink of an eye we crossed the dimensions, skipped the

The silence was the loudest sound I had ever heard.My chest no longer beat in time and motion, for the first time since my ascension in the First Stratum. The fixed, soothing sound of gravity and the intense glare of the stars had been replaced by a frightening emptiness.I opened my eyes.I was stretched out on a medical cot in the obsidian dreadnought. The lights in the med-bay were dim and sterile, burning my eyes. I wanted to extend my spatial perception in order to sketch the room, to sense the ocean's atmosphere outside the hull.Nothing happened.I was totally, utterly unaware of the universe. I was only able to see what was in front of me. What my physical ears heard, I could only hear. The fearsome, all-knowing tie to reality's dimensional fabric had been cut.I wanted to get up, but it was only a matter of seconds before I shifted my weight and a crushing, suffocating pressure came down on my chest.My pitch-black Event Horizon armor, which had been as light as silk when po

I used to fold space to cross continents. Now, I felt every single rattle and jolt of the Zenith drop-ship as it tore through the turbulent Earth atmosphere at Mach 4.Maya crackled into my helmet's comms, "We're approaching the coordinates.“Maya,” I crackled back, “We're approaching the coordinates.” “Boss, the origin energy pooling under the Sierra Nevadas is so dense, it's creating a localized magnetic storm, I can't get the dreadnought in the lower atmosphere without frying the navigation array.”I ordered the dreadnought to stay in low orbit, and held myself back from the bulkheads as the drop-ship violently shook. Just keep the main plasma batteries warm, we'll need a very big hammer.The heavy ramp opened and there were jagged snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.But it wasn't snow white. It was a dim, pale, sickly gold.A huge underground stream of Zenith Qi was clearly visible, running up the side of a large, jagged valley, glowing. The golden light had sett