“Marcus?” Demi muttered, consumed with disbelief. It was Marcus’ personal ship that cruised over them, though he hadn’t the time to get to it to leave his facility on Mars. It was left behind for another. The cockpit popped open to release a twisting coil of M-Particles. The dark serpent twisted around and surged to the ground between the Higher Order and their cornered prey.
The blackness evaporated from around something that was half woman, half obsidian. The part of her that was human wore the wrinkles of bitter wisdom. It had about two inches of silver hair. The rest yearned to exact the meaning of her life in vengeance. Her mechanical yellow eye locked onto one Dragon after the next. She flung a glossy black arm out, which extended to a forty-foot spear to impale one of the beasts through its pumping heart. The woman retracted the spear and slung it around as a whip before her first target had even fallen. The razor edge of bendable darkness sliced right through the barrier that formed around the next Dragon and its wielder.
“Stop!” Machaeus screamed through Caullen, to the rest of his Dragons. Every one of them took an uneasy pace backward. The woman called back the dark whip to the shape of an arm. “You?”
“Me, you son of a bitch,” said the woman.
“Mo-mo-mo-Morgan?” Howard stammered. He hardly believed the word that struggled to escape him. He knew her face only from the borrowed memories of his grandfather.
“Howard,” Morgan said, more serious than she’d ever been. “You might be the only person
in the Universe who can figure out how to stop that machine. You two, get him into that shrine.” Howard moved without question, without answer. He gave his comrades no choice but to follow. The Dogs of War leaped from the debris of Demi’s ship and rounded the Higher Order to make the last run for the Universe. The Higher Order stayed put, waiting on Machaeus’ word.
“Even I never would have thought…when those Squires ripped you apart, that you’d rebuild yourself as this,” it said instead, and flung both hands out at Morgan. Blackness flooded from under Caullen’s scales.
She slipped to the side to evade a stabbing mass of black tentacles. Her black arm flung over her head to reform as a glaring black claymore. Morgan clove every flailing tendril from its master. She leveled the blade at Caullen, which split down the middle to unleash a flare of Chrysum. Caullen’s shield swirled up to swallow it. By the time it retracted, though, Morgan had zipped over in front of him. She leaped over his swinging claw while her arm morphed again, into a sharp spearhead. She jabbed again and again, each time missing by evasive inches. Caullen answered the onslaught with a wing-strike from the side. Morgan spun around, outside the range of the strike.
She swept one of her glossy black legs, which hooked like an axe head at the end. Caullen lifted his caught leg and flapped his wings to keep upright. Morgan answered with a dodged roundhouse, which she turned into a straight-down executioner’s-block strike. Machaeus caught her foot-axe in both trembling claws. Morgan took the second of calm to look to the Dogs of War behind them. They neared the mouth of the shrine. But the rod from the device on the altar already pulsed with red and black waves of energy.
Morgan spun to the side, into a wild spiral Machaeus couldn’t hope to wrangle. She landed on both black feet. She condensed her dark arm into a shield to bash away the immediate strike of her opponent. In the opening, she condensed her shield into a dense spike and thrust. It struck hard against Machaeus’ own shield of darkness. Mist fulminated from it as she pressed harder, then folded back behind it to rebuild. But Morgan had thought countless days on how she’d end this. She’d lost endless nights of sleep. She knew better than to try and pierce the shield. No, Morgan only pushed against it, with an open shaft at the center of her spike. For every pound of pressure she applied, she funneled more particles from Machaeus’ shield into her own collection.
It happened so gradually, then all at once. Morgan and Machaeus ground together in a stalemate of spike and shield while the rest of the Higher Order looked on, trapped in their own horrified bodies, and the Dogs rushed the cathedral. Then the device inside launched a ring-shaped wave of red and black energy. It leaped through the hole in the ceiling. It cleared the atmosphere in seconds. It headed straight for the Sun just as it crested Mercury’s small, blazing horizon. One by one the Higher Order threw their heads back, in compliance with the pulse of Machaeus in their veins. Their jaws cracked open. Each of them spread their muzzles as wide as they could spread to unleash a beam of Chrysum. Stream after silver firelight stream spiraled around the red-black blast from the shrine. They surged together into a rising column rivaling even the size of the Cerberus’ Dense Fusion Cannon. When it all came together to strike the grand star of the Milky Way, the shockwave rattled scale and bone, and stopped everyone dead.
Everyone but Morgan. She concentrated every ounce of will left in her tired old hybrid body on sucking down as many particles from Machaeus as she could. Stunned by success as he was, his entire shield dissolved inside Morgan’s vacuum spike. She didn’t waste a breath before she released it as a morningstar of a hundred more. The black mist of Machaeus surged from under Caullen’s every scale as dark spikes pierced every aspect of his physical being. The beast collapsed in a senseless heap when Morgan’s black burst dissolved away. Any chance to revel in the victory slipped away with the formless mass of Machaeus that had left Caullen to die alone. Morgan watched it fizzle up into the sky and committed her grudge to go on, through sheer grit, as long as it took. Until she could crush every last subatomic shitstain of Machaeus to nothing.
“Back! Get back!” Morgan screamed to the Dogs of War. They’d become three statues beneath the ring-shaped pulse that fired at the Sun. “It’s too late! It’s started!” She tried again. Still, Demi, Lilia and Howard stood petrified beneath the burning orb that gave their galaxy life. No bigger than a pinprick, a tiny black void had opened in the center of the sun. Every second, it expanded. “Hey!”
One last shrill cry was enough to break them free of their invisible binds. The Dogs of War turned to run with Morgan, back to their destroyed auxiliary craft. They slipped right past the Higher Order, hypnotized to hopelessness with Machaeus’ black mist flooding out of them.
“I’ll call in the Cerberus,” Lilia panted when she reached the side of the auxiliary ship, “We can-”
At just that moment, something hit her, which robbed her of all speech. All feeling. It hit the Dogs of War and the Higher Order at once. None of them knew what it was. Human or Dragon, none of their brains were equipped to understand being deatomized and sucked into the pull of a black hole.
Epilogue
Four shadows suddenly were, in a place of pure, folding light. Each of them had some vague memory of an identity, though none of them felt exactly in possession of one any more. They could tell they had been Demi, Lilia, Howard and Morgan some other time, but this was no place where time was welcome. It was a moment at the same time as forever. This was no place. It was a location outside of where anything was located. All and nothing in one. Somehow, these four shadows in the endless accordion folds of light knew what it was, as well as that they couldn’t. It was Machaeus, all around them. When it spoke, it was not true language, or even a thought. It was truth.
“Before humans, I was here. Before Dragons, I was here. I am here as your current Universe combusts. I will be here after. Always was there matter, condensing, ceasing and bursting back to matter. Always was there me. I was only Machaeus once the Dragons gave me that name. But always was there me. I exist outside the physical, outside of matter.” Try as they might to answer, or move, none of the four shadows could answer. This was no place with voices or words. Only truth.
“I’ve returned the material to balance more than once. Takers always rise from the dust of the Bang. And I let them. Every time I give them the chance, and every time they take too much. They take from the simple, the balanced ones, and call them lesser. They take from one another. I have learned to step in before there is nothing left to take. Human. Dragon. Your time is up.”
“Time... A meaningless measure for a manager of beings on a timer. I move through it, with it, against it. I ensure it goes on. I hope one day, one of you will learn. I hope for something better to watch. Three of you will help me.” All four of the shadows shared the same fearful curiosity at the miscount.
“You. Morgan. You’ve tainted yourself with an adulterated version of my power. The fruits of mankind’s futile flail against the order. You will see the lost branch to its termination. Enjoy the Universe you tried to save. The one you doomed.” A black void in the light unfolded to suck one of the silhouettes through. The folds corrected themselves. Three shadows stood in the infinite light of Machaeus.
“You three will become what I hoped Christopher Droan would. You will become the last light of hope in the darkness, the shard of humanity that lives on from this failed branch to build a better one. You will move as I move, live as I do. Timeless. Formless. Beyond matter. You will be my Disruptors.”
The last echo of grief, of horror, pumped through the vestibular hearts of the three who’d been human. Three whose limits were stripped away. Disruptors. Deep in the last echo of feeling of the one called Demi, a single word formed an impossible thought in the light.
Kalus…
“Kalus!” Sophia’s voice rose through from the halls of the Dragon base. Kalus hardly heard her. He was too hypnotized with the tip of Deepcloud Pillar poking through the bottom of the thick storm. He tried over and again to send a distress call from his survival suit helmet at the lowest point it bobbed. If there was a transmission network in the Pillar, it wasn’t active. But he had to try. He had to get off this lump of clay before Demi, Lilia and Howard…before everything… “Kal! Kalus?” Sophia called. But, at her first step onto the rooftop deck, she froze, just like him. They gazed up together as something horrendous peeked through the clouds.
More than peeking, whatever it was seemed to suck the clouds away, into itself. The longer Kalus and Sophia stared, the more it revealed itself. So too did the two have even less idea of what it was. From their petrified perch atop the Dragons’ base, it looked like a sheet of black and white paper, folded a thousand times over. It slid over the sky, erasing all it overtook. Whatever it edged near began to dissolve, as if it were made of dust.
“What?” Kalus murmured back, numb, “What was it? Anything? Compared to that?” The crack of a hundred stones off the bottom of Deepcloud Pillar snapped Sophia back to life.
“The-the-the-there’s a woman!” Sophia sputtered. Kalus rushed to her, across the top deck to the stairs. He seized her arms to calm her, but she only shook harder.