"I don't like the look of this," Nadian said.

It was a sentiment that all who remained were sharing.

Brooks, Kat, and Nadian had been watching their approach to the dark star with trepidation. Kell seemed unfazed; and in the back, Fromm was burying his head in his hands, mumbling to himself.

The man had been a terrible pick for this, Brooks thought, with both pity and frustration. If Apollonia had been here, she'd still be capable.

But it made him glad to think she was safe.

"Whatever defenses this thing has, I doubt they can hold up if we start diving into the star's corona," Kat said.

"We already are in it," Brooks said. "A star this big, its corona will be massive. We must be inside it by now." He glanced about the room. "If this vessel is using magnetic fields to protect itself, what I'm most worried about is when we hit the chromosphere. This star is highly active, and the chance of us hitting a plasma jet are high. We're lucky we haven't already-"

"Incoming," Nadian said.

Brooks looked out, and saw that just what he had spoken of was blasting towards them. The speed of it, well tens of kilometers a second, far too fast for them to avoid even if they could have controlled the ship.

They flinched as the jet of plasma hit them. It seemed to engulf the ship completely, and Brooks knew that he was about to die.

Yet nothing happened.

He rose, cautiously. The entire screen was covered in a brilliant glow. It had to have been dimmed significantly, and he could see patterns in the plasma that showed the lines of magnetic field that had caused the plasma burst.

"Kell," he said, his voice hoarse. He felt shaken and weak from the realization that he was not about to die. "Is the ship all right?"

Kell did not answer him.

Instead, he found himself once again in that white space of nothingness where he had encountered the Present Mind earlier.

Maybe this was what being dead was like, he thought with grim amusement.

"You are not dead," a voice replied. It was his own voice again, but speaking out loud, coming from everywhere.

He scowled. "Do you have a default form? Take that and show yourself, Present Mind."

It appeared before Brooks, and his heart jumped again as he realized just what it was he was looking at.

It was a massively tall being, just over three meters in height. Its body was shield-shaped, its head armored and fused into its trunk, leaving no details exposed. Very long and thin legs came from what one might expect to be the shoulders, and smaller arms were folded up on the lower, pointed tip of its body.

It matched the descriptions of those who had seen the Source; the ancient, withered body that had been in the sarcophagus that the Greggan pirates had discovered. But this was not a withered husk, resembling instead a living being.

His heart pounded faster, gazing up at the face that showed nothing.

It was one of the creators of Kell's kind, those who had once ruled the stars and molded the universe like clay-

"My creators are many and varied," the Present Mind said. There was a hum of words from within its shelled head, but its real voice was directly into his mind.

Only now it did not mimic him, but was alien and intrusive, almost staggering him by its very strength and leaving behind a strange feeling of numbness.

"You see why I attempted forms more familiar to yourself," it said.

"Is the ship in danger?" he asked the thing, trying to push through the impression it left in his mind. There were thoughts, alien thoughts, left in him that were hard to understand.

"No," the Present Mind replied. "Your panic is unbecoming."

The rebuke was annoying, but he ignored it. "Where are we going? Why into the star?"

"You are moving into position."

"Position for what? As obvious as this may all be to you and your creators, to us it makes no sense."

"To see," the Present Mind replied. There was a stronger sense of the last word in his mind, as if it meant far more than the simple word implied.

"Explain, please," Brooks said. "What can we see?"

"My creators could see all of the universe," the Present Mind told him. "Where they could see, they could be. But the universe of their time was smaller - and it grew. It grew so large that to see those distant places was to look into the past. Thus, the Enablings of Seeing were constructed. This was among their greatest, harnessing the dark heart of this unnatural star to view more than the mundane universe. With it was the hope to understand more - to understand all."

The voice paused. "But they miscalculated."

Brooks felt nearly overwhelmed by all of the words sent into his mind. But he needed to know more. "Miscalculated how? Is there danger still?"

"My creators understood time only as you do; a linear path one must follow. It fit the universe that was observed - all except for the Great Ones, who they still desired to understand. In creating this station they had hoped to learn the truth of them."

The Present Mind paused. "But instead, they destroyed the gate."

The gate. Kell had called it that as well.

If it meant a gateway to zerospace . . . he could see the logic. There was a connection between gravity and zerospace portals. It was how the Craton was able to move itself without reaction mass.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

So this star, being as massive as it was, was it also a zerogate?

"Are you saying this station broke the star itself? Is it destroyed in . . . at my point of linear time? Is that why we don't see it? Is this a simulation?"

"Such a massive object cracked the reality under it, allowing free passage," the Present Mind told him. "But such an object could not stay stable. I do not know if this was a mistake of the Great Ones or if this station destabilized the star. But it became unstable . . ." A note of regret came into its feelings. "For which I am responsible."

It shifted suddenly. "The story begins."

"What story?" Brooks asked.

"The one you wished to know."

Brooks found himself back in the ship.

"We're going deeper," he heard Nadian say. He was looking at something on a panel, and glanced up to look at Brooks. "I've got a map of our location."

"How did you do that?" Brooks asked, feeling unsteady on his feet.

"Careful," Nadian said. "The Present Mind packs a bit of a punch."

Brooks could not hide the surprise on his face. "You spoke to it?"

"Yeah," Nadian said. "I think we all did."

"Why didn't you mention it?" Brooks asked.

"Same reason you didn't," Nadian replied. "Either you also had and were holding it back, or else I was the only one and you'd think I had gone nuts."

Which was fair, Brooks thought.

Kat spoke. "Fergus definitely had - that's how he 'figured out' how to operate the controls. I think that he asked it the wrong questions and got some bad advice."

Brooks looked at her. "It told me about the temple," she said. "That it's . . . like an observatory."

"One that was meant to observe Leviathans," Brooks added. He looked to Kell, whose expression was set grimly, almost daring Brooks to ask him something.

He looked back to Nadian instead. "You asked it about the controls."

"Yeah, well, a little. It's not the best teacher, but I got some idea. Look - here's where we are, I think."

The screen outside was just a brilliant glow. Sometimes in it he could see patterns of plasma flow within the star.

Over that a flat image appeared of a sphere with distinct layers. There was a dot that likely represented them.

"It looks like we're still in a convection zone, though the layering of this star is more complex than any I've seen," Brooks said.

"Probably because it's so massive," Kat said. "I estimate this one has almost a hundred million solar masses. About as big as has ever been theorized."

"My god," Brooks said. Such an object was far beyond what he could even imagine.

At this scale it would not even be a true star, living off the fusion of light elements. Its core would be so dense and massive that it would collapse . . . leaving the star with a black hole for a heart.

"We're speeding up," Nadian said.

"You didn't find out how to alter our course?" Brooks asked.

"The alien space station voice in my head didn't get to that part," Nadian replied. "I'm not sure that it can even do it. It seems like we're locked in . . . to something."

Kat pointed. "I see something out there."

Brooks and Nadian followed her gaze, and after a moment he realized that there was something in the star. It was so huge that it filled the screen.

Only a general shape was visible; something massive, parts of it moving, feeling their way forward through the star.

It was not just some strange shape of plasma. It was alive.

"Nothing could live in this," Nadian said, rapt with both awe and fear.

"Except a Leviathan," Brooks said.

As if the ship had heard his words, it all suddenly rocked, their view altering as the ship abruptly began to turn.

"What's going on?" Kat cried, the ship shaking.

"It's changing course! It's taking us back out of the star."

Nadian grabbed Kat, pulling her with him towards the floor for safety against the rocking. Brooks could not tear his eyes off of the shape before them. They were withdrawing and turning, and he tried to follow it around, but it began to shrink from view.

Tobias Fromm staggered forward, putting out a hand towards the screen.

"No . . ." he said throatily.

The ship was accelerating at an insane speed, and they came out of the star in moments, moving at a rate that must have been a notable fraction of C, Brooks thought.

Yet as it came to a stop, he felt only the slightest tremor.

They held their position, Nadian and Kat slowly getting to their feet and staring with him.

The surface of the star erupted as something came out. Dwarfed by the star, it still drew all attention.

It magnified on the screen, and Brooks felt himself nearly white out at the sight of it.

Its surface shimmered and reformed, from a slagged, scorched mess to wholeness, as if traversing the raging power of the dark star was only a mild inconvenience.

"No, no, no . . ." Fromm moaned, pressing his face to the glass.

Brooks understood why he was yelling. He, too, recognized the Leviathan. He could never forget it, and even his system noted key details that confirmed his thought.

It was the Leviathan from Terris.

"The story you want to know." The voice of the Present Mind had said. The story of the monster that had destroyed a star system.

"No! No! No!" Fromm screamed, pounding his fists onto the wall-screen. He was doing it with reckless abandon, the bones in his hands crunching, and Brooks stumbled over, trying to grab his flailing limbs.

"Help me!" he called to Nadian.

He could barely control one of the man's arms, but as he did the man thrashed his whole torso and neck forward, smashing his head into the wall instead.

"I see it every night! I can't get it out!" he screamed, his voice bloodily hoarse.

As was the wall; Brooks tried to leverage him away from it, but even as he pulled him to the floor, the man began to bash his head back onto it, leaving bloody splatters.

Nadian took his other arm, and they tried to pull the man away from that, but there was almost no place to take him. He struggled with inhuman ferocity, continuing to hit himself until Brooks could hear his skull crack and break, each subsequent impact causing more damage. His words became garbled nonsense, and he flailed his limbs so hard that they could not even keep ahold of him.

Breaking free, he staggered, running towards the back of the ship.

Kell was there, and caught him.

"Rest," Kell said softly.

The man sagged in his grip.

Brooks and Nadian both rushed over.

Putting his fingers to the man's neck, Brooks felt no pulse. Nothing at all.

He looked to Kell, whose face looked only slightly withdrawn. "He will dream of it no more."

"He was there," Nadian breathed. "He was from Terris, wasn't he? Originally."

Kell nodded.

"Something's happening to the star!" Kat called. "I think it's going to go nova!"

They turned back, seeing that the star was swelling rapidly. The Leviathan was still there, and was swallowed up. Brooks wished that would have been the end of it, but he knew it would not.

The outer layer was growing, reaching towards them.

"Someone get us the hell out of here!" Nadian called.

"Too late!" Kat screamed.

The star had swollen so large it could have encompassed the whole of the Sol system. And then it tore itself apart.

Brooks could not help but to throw himself back, as pitiful a gesture as it was.

He could not imagine the energy and heat that must have been washing over and around them.

In the bizarre, sped-up way of everything they had seen, though, the explosion faded. Through a milky fog they could see the stellar remnant left behind;

A black hole, one large enough to be the heart of an entire galaxy.

Perhaps their galaxy, Brooks thought in awe.

"Where's the Leviathan?" Kat asked.

"Gone," Brooks said, his voice a croak. "Gone somewhere else."