The void of the Ashen Deep did not echo, but the sheer kinetic violence of our advance carved a screaming wake through the dead space.I didn't even try to avoid the clusters of frozen Leviathans and sharp gargoyles that were blocking our way to the upside-down Ziggurat. I was a localised reality battering ram. I had my Event Horizon armor compacted to my body and applied the absolute gravity of my core, violently bending the space directly in front of me. The hundreds of horrified skeletons that had been sucked into the localised singularity of my wake, were crushed against each other, until their stone bodies were ground into fine gray dust.Aria flew in my slipstream, her hybridized silver and gold threads lashing out to catch any stasis-puppet that got too close to me through my gravity well. She did not waste the railgun slugs on fodder; she used her threads as surgical whips and she neatly decapitated the rusted grinding automatons before they could bring their petrifying claws

The silence of the Tartarus Pits didn't just break; it shattered into a billion roaring, chaotic fragments.The ambient reality of the First Stratum violently rebooted as the silver dust of Malakor settled on the newly vibrant glowing roots of the dimensional tree. The dark Qi waterfalls outside the Ziggurat were suddenly frozen and crashed down like colliding oceans. Tons of petrified crust was thrown off, as the stationary jagged planets grumbled as millions of years of stasis of their kinetic energy came rushing back to them.And then came the screaming.We came out of the inner sanctum, standing at the top of the steps of the Ziggurat. The dead space of the Ashen Deep was gone. Instead, there was a huge, primordial sky, with the roar of millions of roused monsters echoing in its depths.The huge beings, the giants of the heavens, were breaking free from their frozen forms, their muscles bulging with untamed strength. The spiked Leviathans roared and snapped in the new currents of

Seven years.In the great mathematics of the universe seven years was a mere twinkle of an eye. It was a mere rounding error for the old-time, holistic god-kings of the Upper Realm. For the first two decades of his life, he had been a scrapper in the gutter, but seven years of unbroken peace seemed like forever.I was seated on the void-metal throne in the Citadel, a holographic projection of the multiverse that was spinning slowly in the middle of the large hall. The dimensional tree was in excellent condition. The deep ruby-red of the Tartarus roots thrummed with primeval strength. The skies were clear over the Apex Stratum, a layer that was violet. Even the chaotic Neutral Zone, where the Ascension Gates was located, had become a routine, orderly, bureaucratic hum.I was in the midst of a territorial dispute between two newly ascended Fourth Stratum sects, one of which was about a nebula with lots of raw iron. It was like cosmic paperwork.I waved away the holographic document and

Shutting down the Ascension Gates was like suffocating a sun.I was standing on the command bridge of the Citadel, watching the huge holographic display of the multiverse as Maya was performing the override codes. The immense pitch-black archways of the Neutral Zone, the crucibles that had created the new dynamic balance of the Heavens, violently severed the blue creation fire and abyssal void they had been bringing.The blinding beacon in the center of the dimensional tree disappeared on the map and was replaced with a cold, empty black.Maya reported, her hands pounding on the crystal console, "The Gates are offline. The primitive horde can absorb the ambient energy of the multiverse like a sponge, I'm sending the dimensional tree's energy into the Tartarus Pits.“Earth is already dark,” Aria added, her silver eyes taking in the lower branches of the projection. Any sensor searching for origin energy will not see the mortal realms during the quarantine.I didn't relax. The holograph

I didn't fly up to the alien dreadnought. I fell upward.Between the Citadel, and the massive black ring that was blocking the sky, there was physical space, which I couldn't ignore when the crimson anchor was suppressing dimensional folding. Rather, I set my own local gravity against itself. The Primordial Eclipse in my chest roared, its great weight shifting, the sky became my floor.I rocketed along the edge of the blinding, crimson digital tether, the sheer kinetic friction burning the air around my Event Horizon armor. As I climbed, the AA guns on the underside of the Harvester fired jagged streams of neon-red plasma without me taking cover. I was a void bullet. The plasma hit the black singularity that had gathered around me and was sucked into it.I crashed feet first into the solid black synthetic metal of the Harvester's lower hull.This created a hole in the hull, spewing freezing white coolant into the air. I was not able to give the ship's internal sensors time to pick up