This was not the first time E’lamn had tracked down a Hydrogene, nor was it the first time he had fought a strong opponent, but this could be the first time he was actually losing, the blood leaving his body, a sign pointing in that direction.
The blood did not spray out; there was no atmosphere, no wind to scatter it in dramatic fashion. Instead, it just drifted, like dark, glistening beads, effortlessly tumbling away, each bead a silent badge of failure on his part.
The strike had come too fast, too fast for him to react in time. Elemental energy, compressed into a dense beam, coherence forced by nothing but intent from the Hydrogene. He raised his hand instinctively, seeing the flash of power, his fingers spread in panic. His palm flared in power as he drew from himself. Space froze and hardened under his will, density spiked, but not enough as his own energy met the oncoming blow.
The collision was explosive, the elemental blast slammed across his defence, screaming as if it lost cohesion. Burning away in arcs of silver and purple light, peeling off into the nothingness. The majority of the blast was stripped of structure and intent, collapsing into harmless scatter.
But not all, a single filament survived his block, a needle-thin, condensed beam of power, impossibly focused, slipped through the minute gaps between his fingers, and seared across his cheek. At first, it looked like light had briefly illuminated his cheek for a fraction of a second and left without any trace. But then his cheek split, an opening in the flesh, followed by blood, then pain.
It was as if something had reached into his head and dragged fire directly across his nerves, lighting each individual nerve ending at once. His vision flared white, the sensation tearing through him with such sudden, intimate violence that for a fraction of a second he forgot where he was. The cold of the void followed immediately, biting into exposed tissue, amplifying the agony rather than dulling it.
Blood pooled in his mouth as he tasted iron, he clenched his teeth steeling himself. His legs snapped forward in a scissor-like motion as he wrenched himself around the void. His boots scraped against nothing as his inner balance screamed to orientate him. There was no ground, no up or down, only vectors and memory. E’lamn remembered the words of his old master, “Space does not forgive hesitation. In the vacuum, momentum is but just memory, and memory kills."
Across the void, the Hydrogene stretched and reformed. Its body forming a towering lattice of light and mass that was constantly shifting, never quite setting into a shape the mind wanted to accept. Its edges blurred against the distant stars; depth seemed to fold in upon itself.
Like all Hydrogene, this creature had once been something else, something born of atmosphere and pressure gradients, now though it was vast and diffuse, with intent. Now it was a predator.
"You're improving," E'lamn hissed, shaping the words with his intent rather than sound. His tone was visceral, yet steady. As if the words were said more for himself than the Hydrogene. The strike had been close, if he had not turned his head at the last moment, he would not be saying these words right now. “Close, but you are my prey now!”
The Hydrogene did not respond to his words, they never did. They showed some resemblance of intent, but it was chaotic and unbound. Like hunger, constantly starving never able to quell the desire to feed, its rage lashing out in protest.
They never spoke or communicated in a language E’lamn understood, he knew many, even of the old tongue. Instead, it thought in gradients of advantage, consumption curves and diminishing resistance. In away it was a cruel joke the universe seemed to be playing. Immense power without reason, only forward motion to consume, never help. Its intent was simple, devour and it was wining.
E’lamn groaned as he flexed the fingers on his hand, sensation crawled back after infusing so much energy into it. The skin on his cheek began to knit back together, closing the wound like it had never been there. He brushed at his cheek, that small act of repair had cost him, siphoned energy reserves he had intended to hold in reserve. The thought annoyed him more than the pain, his misjudgement, the length of this engagement and that was on him.
He had stalked this Hydrogene across six worlds before today. Six places of abundant life no more. It had descended on these places like a storm, striping matter and meaning alike. Ecosystems collapsed. Civilizations reduced to scavengers and ghosts picking through the bones of what had taken millennia to build. And each time E’lamn had arrived too late, but not now.
The Hydrogene surged forward, energy condensing into a brutal, hammering blow. Light shifted from its extremities and focused into the point of contact. E’lamn saw this coming and twisted at the waist, forcing his body into the narrow margin between impact and annihilation. At the last moment, the Hydrogene altered its direction, too fast for E’lamn to respond. The strike grazed his shoulder. But grazing meant little when the force carried intent dense enough to flatten cities.
E’lamn’s layered reinforcement buckled, then shattered. Something tore loose inside him and electrical energy burned down his arm. He drew on more reserves to halt the cascade of destruction his body was under. He managed to prevent the energy spreading through the rest of his body, but his arm now hung limp, burned and stiff like the branch of a tree, small sparks of the attack still sizzling in places.
He bit back a curse and kicked off the void—an old reflex, meaningless without a surface but useful all the same. He snapped his legs, flaring his body’s control fields, forcing himself sideways and away, trying to buy distance before the next wave arrived.
The Hydrogene followed. It was relentless in its pursuit. The hunter had now become the hunted. Its shifting lattice narrowed as it poured more energy into every attack; they were more aggressive, more focused. It had sensed weakness.
The creature advanced at speed, not giving E’lamn time to breathe. It sent out bolts of white, jagged light that at first E’lamn ignored. They weren’t lethal—slow, even easily avoided—then the Hydrogene split. Not cleanly, not symmetrically, but at impossible angles. It tore its being into hundreds of overlapping tendrils. Light exploded as fragments of the lattice stretched and snapped back like elastic under strain. A spiralling cage of motion and pressure pushed down on E’lamn as he cursed.
How stupid. The Hydrogene had baited him, sprayed potshots at him, guiding him toward this encased prison. Energy lashed outward from the Hydrogene’s circling form, whips of condensed force crackling across space and directly at E’lamn. They struck at E’lamn’s defences like the rays of a star would fall on you—constant and unrelenting. The magnitude of the strikes was not as fierce. No, these were not meant to shatter him, but to wear him down. Each impact shaved away fractions of his shields, sanding them down through attrition rather than force.
E’lamn twisted and forced his body through impossibly tight gaps between converging strikes. He bled energy with every movement as the speed of the onslaught increased. He conjured more defences that were destroyed before solidifying. He tried to redirect the momentum of the strikes by allowing himself to take several head-on, turning him in another direction, but every time his movement was blocked by more strikes.
A lash caught his leg, peeling across his calf and stripping layers of reinforcement away like bark from a tree. Pain flared white-hot as the attack broke through. His body responded, rerouting the damage as his leg went numb.
More strikes broke through—a strike to his back, then another to his side. Within one blink of an eye, over a hundred strikes found their target. His body tried to react, but he was bleeding from everywhere, fragments of himself shedding into the void, and still the Hydrogene pressed.
The spiral of attacks tightened, the Hydrogene’s fragments moving faster, each beam converging with uncanny coordination. This was not thought, not planning, but adaptation—raw, brutal efficiency that had learned the shape of its prey.
Urgent now, E’lamn searched for an opening, a gap in the blizzard that tore around him. His defences screamed as they were rebuilt and torn apart just as fast. Blow after blow landed, resonance building as feedback rattled his internal alignment like a structure hit by repeated seismic shocks.
He couldn’t keep this up for much longer. Another minute and he would be too drained to even move, never mind fight. He bit his lip, blood rolling down his chin, then floating off into space. He did not like what was to come next. It took a strain on him that required too long to recover from. But the devastation this Hydrogene could inflict if he didn’t act did not bear thinking of.
He reached inward and unlatched what he had tethered. The power answered like a predator waking. Space around E’lamn darkened for a moment and all attacks seemed to fizzle and die like a small burning stick dropped in an ocean. A black orb formed in his hand. It unfolded and compressed with his intent into a blade as long as his body—sharpened on one side, a narrow edge that seemed to devour light rather than reflect it.
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His fingers closed around the hilt as the void recoiled subtly, as if reality itself recognised the power and leaned away from it. The weapon drank from him immediately, not carefully or politely, but with rage and anger, as if it would consume E’lamn before the Hydrogene. His vision flickered as his reserves were drained.
The Hydrogene’s assault faltered. Either it became confused as to why its attacks had stopped damaging him, or it felt the power now before it. Its paths wavered, its spiral loosening for the briefest fraction of a second—and that was all E’lamn needed.
E’lamn lunged at the distracted Hydrogene. Space folded as he accelerated, his body aligning into a spear with the weapon at his apex. Just before the tip of the blade made contact with the spinning form of the Hydrogene, he spun into a roll, the blade following suit and sweeping down in an arc that cut through space itself and straight through the Hydrogene.
Where the blade passed, the Hydrogene’s lattice warped and exploded, its white brilliance collapsing into dim purples and void-black distortions as its severed filaments slammed into one another, its coherence unravelling under conflicting vectors.
The storm finally broke around E’lamn as fragments of the Hydrogene collided and tore through one another. It spiralled outward and away in chaotic trajectories, its structure tearing itself apart under the strain as E’lamn gave pursuit.
E’lamn staggered after it, his weapon dimming in his grip, its hunger temporarily sated, leaving behind exhaustion so profound it hollowed him out. But he could not let the Hydrogene get away. He drew on his last reserves. Coming back from this would not be easy, if at all possible, but he would not give way. His chest crushed under the strain as he stabilised himself, his movements sluggish, though the Hydrogene was not in much better shape.
The Hydrogene fled, flinging itself across the darkness in a desperate rush of collapsing light. Its lattice twisted and incomplete as energy leaked from every wound. E’lamn followed, grimly forcing himself forward, unleashing attack after attack, trying to end things once and for all.
He had won, E’lamn thought, as the Hydrogene stopped motionless and let two attacks rip through it without the slightest movement. Then fear gripped him as the creature changed direction and took off at speed toward the rings of a gas giant in the nearby planetary system.
The Hydrogene plunged through the rings of the gas giant. Matter roared and exploded as it was devoured. Its white lattice flared brighter as energy surged through it. Tendrils knit together with stolen mass and energy. It emerged from the far side of the planet, its wounds sealed, its structure reinforced—a shining lattice against the black.
E’lamn cursed and resolve settled upon him. He had to end it now. The creature had replenished, but he couldn’t let it take any more. He gathered everything about himself and struck. A final, massive projection of force exploded out of his weapon, slamming into the Hydrogene and planet like a collapsing star.
A light so bright washed-out space, E’lamn covering his eyes with his arm instinctively. His weapon condensed and absorbed back into his body as his shoulder slumped. He jerked involuntarily as exhaustion tore at him, slowly opening his eyes to see the result of his attack. The planet was no more—vapourised in a flash—but in the distance a white light, misshapen but still there, headed toward him.
He had nothing left. It was over. This creature had won and would continue to destroy its way across the universe and possibly beyond. Still, he would not surrender. He would make it difficult for the Hydrogene to end him. He pushed away with as much speed as he could muster, letting his momentum carry him into the darkness of the void. The Hydrogene followed, and to E’lamn’s grim delight, though still in better shape than him, it was not whole.
Attacks came after a while. With nothing left to raise defences, they tore through his body as he tried to keep as much distance as he could from his attacker. Blood sprayed from his body and polluted his mind as he looked at it floating across the cosmos, marking his final resting place. There wasn’t long left now. And then—
Nothing.
The thought shot him out of his stupor. He could feel nothing up ahead. No planets. No stars. No aether. He scanned his surroundings, letting his intent spread out. Had this fight really brought them so close? Strange—he had never been here before, only heard the stories, the truth about the Verge.
A moment in space and time that did not exist but also did. It didn’t kill, invite, like, or want. It just withheld. Withheld everything, even the aether that all life survived on, the very essence of existence. Nothing had ever penetrated its edges. Nothing had ever survived long enough to reach it. Everything was stripped away on approach.
He let himself drift closer to the Verge, feeling its pressure increase, its quiet insistence that he turn away. His legs burned—not with muscle fatigue, but with the strain of forcing coherence against the Verge’s thinning. Every adjustment cost him more now. Every correction dragged like walking through deep water.
The Hydrogene surged forward, powerful and intent on devouring. It did not think, did not reason, and E’lamn was counting on that. He stopped as close to the Verge as he dared and let the creature advance on him. The Hydrogene struck, and E’lamn took the blow full on.
Energy tore into his side, ripping mass and coherence away. Blood scattered in a slow, glittering burst. Something vital faltered. His vision narrowed. For a moment, the void became too big and too empty, and he teetered at the edge of blackout.
But he had timed it perfectly. He twisted through the pain and swung his arm around, pouring as much remaining energy as he could into it. The many cuts along his arm glowed from beneath with power. He connected with the Hydrogene—not to kill it or damage it, but to change its direction, to push it toward the Verge.
The Hydrogene did not seem bothered, unaware of what had just happened. Its form tightened, sure of its success, as it prepared another attack, all the while still moving toward the Verge. It began to fold inward, collapsing its structure to strike forward—and failed.
There was no aether here. No substrate for its intent to act upon. Instead, the creature elongated. Its lattice lost definition as its momentum bled away. Its options vanished one by one as this part of the universe refused to spend energy making its intent complete. The creature writhed, form distorting as it tried to force the transition, burning internal reserves in a futile attempt to cross a line that did not exist.
The Hydrogene’s final moments were not grand or explosive. It simply faded as its movements became slower and slower until it stopped altogether, then vanished entirely, as if it had never existed at all.
E’lamn watched as the final ray of the Hydrogene faded. He then smiled at nothing and let the exhaustion take him as he drifted in orbit around the boundary of the Verge.
Awareness returned to E’lamn as he drifted in a slow orbit around the Verge, caught in its thinning influence like debris circling a gravity well that should not exist. His senses came back one by one as his mind cleared. They were muted and distorted, like he was surfacing from a dream. His sight, sound, feeling, pain, and then the memory of the fight.
He had been too aggressive to start, he thought, too confident in his victory. He had underestimated the Hydrogene or overestimated his own skill. He should have planned better. After all, his intelligence, though lacking in this encounter, was his true advantage in this engagement. He had cut it close, too close, and if not for circumstances he would not be here now.
The thought lingered as he floated in the blackness. It did not strike fear in him; he had known fear and set it aside a long time ago. It lingered on responsibility, that had self-accumulated over time, layered by one decision atop another until only duty remained. He had survived though, yet he knew that did not mean he had done well here.
Time passed, an age for some, until a flicker of strength seeped back into him. Not much, but enough to quiet his internal alarms. Some of his smaller wounds started to fuse back together; most did not. The deeper ones would take a lot longer to heal. Still, he could focus now and stabilised his alignment, pushing and feeling for the aether. It was thin this close to the Verge, but still there. That was when he noticed motion.
A small object drifted off in the distance, tumbling about with no urgency or awareness. It was metal, cold, dull, and unmistakably primitive. Its energy signature was unlike anything he had seen before, and weak—very weak. E’lamn was about to dismiss it when he realised the object was not merely near the Verge but was coming out of it.
E’lamn watched in fascination, frozen still as the object slipped free of the boundary around the Verge. There was no resistance or distortion. No release of energy. The object simply passed through, as freely as the wind blew in the sky.
In the object’s wake, a thin distortion lingered, like a narrow tear in space, quiet and still. Reality there felt incomplete, like a sentence left unfinished. The tear grew as the object travelled further out and past the point where the aether stopped. Then the aether fell back along the tear, pushing out and expanding. Like a waterfall with no bottom, the aether poured, stabilising the tear and creating a tunnel that bridged reality with the Verge.
Nonsense started to push back. That really was the only way E’lamn could describe it as. Like something unfinished, something not quite right. The flow of aether started to slow. The tear was beginning to repair itself, the wound closing and returning to what it once was.
He looked once more as the object that had passed slowly drifted out into the void. It had markings etched into its surface—strange symbols arranged with care and attention. They meant nothing to him, just a garbled message cast blindly into the darkness. E’lamn stiffened, looked back to the tear and then the object. If this object could pass unnoticed, he thought, then something had changed in the Verge. If this could pass through, could something else?
E’lamn felt his curiosity tighten into something sharper. What was the Verge? It was said to have existed before all—space, time, even the aether. Many had spent lifetimes, and others, trying to learn from it, but no one ever had. It was just too destructive. He laughed. Even aether could not touch its edge. Yet here it did, through that small tunnel that was now slowly closing.
He was moving towards the tear before he had made his decision. He would know this place. Approaching the tear slow and careful, he felt for the aether, or more accurately, he felt for the lack of it. The absence of aether was not in itself dangerous. There were forbidden places, known to a few, where it did not penetrate, but it did not kill—directly. Here, however, in the deep reaches of space, no aether meant death. He would not be able to sustain his body, strengthen his core. His body would break down in the coldness of space.
The aether here was plentiful, and he navigated along the tear. He focused and maintained his direction as he felt the absence surrounding the tear pushing in, trying to claim the space once more. As he approached the opening of the tear, he felt something peel away at him—not painfully but inspecting. It stripped him down to intent and found him wanting. It judged him, and then he was through.
All the stars seemed to shimmer, as if he was looking at them through a filter. All except one not far away. It was warm and unremarkable, its light spilling gently into the dark. A selection of small planets was caught in its orbit. E’lamn’s eyes widened as he focused on one of the small planets, blue and full of life.
“There is life here?”
