The Last Sacrifice
The *Last Bastion's* alarms screamed in discordant harmony as space itself tore apart around them. Syra's neural interface burned white-hot, the Archive flooding her mind with catastrophic warnings in a dead First Ones' dialect. She tasted copper - her own blood dripping from ruptured capillaries.
"Report!" Ignar's voice boomed over the chaos, his glass form refracting emergency lights into prismatic shards across the command deck.
Lira wrestled with her rebellious prosthetic arm, the Leviathan steel twisting like a living thing. "It's not just breaking," she snarled. "It's rewriting the damn rules!" Outside the viewport, constellations dissolved in perfect geometric patterns, swallowed by growing fissures of absolute nothingness.
Aeloria's storm-form crackled violently. **"We were wrong. The seal was never meant to hold a weapon."** Lightning arced from her form, grounding itself in the ship's conduits. **"They imprisoned a fundamental force."**
---
Kael stood motionless at the observation port, his corrupted hands pressed against the reinforced glass. Where his fingers touched, frost spread in intricate fractal patterns. "It's calling," he murmured. "Through me."
Syra's remaining eye dilated as the Archive forced new understanding into her mind. "The Fracture Point - it's not a location. It's a..." She gasped as the knowledge burned through her synapses. "A dimensional wound. And Kael's Mark is the infection vector."
Lira's head snapped up. "So we're flying straight into a cosmic tumor? Fantastic plan."
Ignar's magma core pulsed dangerously. "Alternative suggestions?"
The silence that followed was louder than any alarm.
---
As they pierced the event boundary, reality itself unraveled:
**The Ship**: Bulkheads warped into impossible geometries, the *Bastion* groaning like a living creature in pain.
- Syra's neural tendrils crystallized with alien knowledge
- Lira's prosthetic became a writhing mass of black filaments
- Ignar's glass form showed fractures revealing molten light beneath
At the center of the anomaly floated a perfect sphere of void. Not darkness - the complete absence of existence. And within it...
An eye.
Not an organ, but a concept given form. It regarded them with terrifying patience.
*"YOU ARE EARLY."*
The voice vibrated through their bones at a frequency that made teeth ache.
---
Kael collapsed as his body began unraveling into strands of light and shadow. "It's too late for me," he gasped. "But you can still—"
Lira caught him with her human arm. "Shut up. We don't leave our own."
Aeloria's form destabilized violently. **"The infection is spreading. We have minutes."**
Syra made the calculations. "There's one way. We use the Shard of Eternity as a focal point—"
Ignar finished her thought: "And turn Kael into a living bomb."
The corrupted Guardian laughed bitterly. "Poetic."
Outside, the eye blinked.
---
The *Last Bastion* was coming apart at the seams.
Lira gasped as her prosthetic arm's filaments burrowed deeper into her chest, black tendrils spiderwebbing beneath her skin. "Oh, you traitorous piece of—" She seized a plasma cutter from Ignar's belt and severed the writhing limb at the elbow. The detached metal dissolved into fractal patterns before hitting the deck.
Kael convulsed against the command console, his form flickering between solid and shadow. "It's... rewriting my code," he choked out. "Turning me into its doorway."
Syra's crystallized neural tendrils hummed as she accessed the Archive. "We have seventeen minutes before the infection consumes our reality anchors." Her voice was calm, but her remaining eye wept black fluid. "The Shard can catalyze a containment blast, but we need—"
"A sacrifice," Aeloria finished. Her storm-form had compacted into a dense singularity of lightning, barely holding back the encroaching void.
---
Lira slammed Kael against the bulkhead. "No. There's always another way." Blood trickled from her nose where the corruption had spread.
Kael's smile was heartbreakingly human. "You never could accept losing, could you?" His flickering hand brushed her cheek—a touch that didn't burn. "But this isn't defeat. It's the only victory that matters."
Ignar's glass body had begun melting under the strain. "The calculations are clear. A living conduit is required to—"
"Then let it be me!" Lira's remaining fist clenched. "I'm already infected!"
Syra's voice cut through like a scalpel. "Your body would detonate in microseconds. Kael's hybrid nature makes him the only viable—"
A shockwave rocked the ship. The eye outside pulsed, and suddenly they could *understand* it:
**"YOU STRUGGLE AGAINST INEVITABILITY. HOW ADORABLE."**
---
The plan formed in terrible clarity:
1. **The Shard** (embedded in the ship's core)
2. **The Sacrifice** (Kael's unraveling form as the catalyst)
3. **The Trigger** (Aeloria's storm-energy to ignite the reaction)
Lira refused to release Kael's arm. "There has to be another—"
"Look at me," Kael commanded. His eyes held hers—no longer hollow, but blazing with purpose. "The arm was just the beginning. In three minutes, you'll start seeing through its eyes. Then you'll beg me to do this."
Aeloria's voice was barely audible over the screaming void: **"He's right."**
---
Kael pressed his forehead to Lira's. "This was always the end of my story. But yours?" His fingers interlaced with hers—one set human, one set monstrous. "Yours terrifies them. That's why you have to survive."
Syra initiated the sequence. The Shard's light turned the command deck into a prism of agony.
Ignar anchored Kael in place as the energy built. "Make it count, brother."
Kael's final words were lost in the detonation—but Lira, screaming against the light, would swear she heard him laugh.
---
The blast wave should have vaporized them. Instead:
- The *Bastion* floated intact in normal space
- The Fracture Point was gone
- Floating where the eye had been...
A single, perfect shard of black glass.
Lira collapsed, her infection miraculously purged. "He... won?"
Aeloria's storm-form flickered weakly. **"No. He changed the rules."**
On the viewscreen, new stars ignited in the pattern of Kael's Mark.
---