“Turn. Slowly. Hands right where I can see them.”

Malan felt his fists clench and unclench, fighting desperately to process what he was hearing. Talia. It was Talia. How could that possibly be the case? Sweet, kind Talia, who’d always had a positive word for him when he needed it most. Talia who had cared when nobody else had.

Talia was the traitor on the verge of killing them all.

He looked out across the stars, trying to delay as much as possible. The rift still hung in space, a gaping crimson and violet wound in the sky, swirling with violent, crackling energy. Oddly, that wound now appeared to be bleeding. Far away as he was, Malan could only make out obsidian objects oozing from the hole like tears. The distance was still enormous, but Malan took an instinctive step back, regardless.

He knew exactly what those shapes were.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

The feel of Talia’s warm breath on his neck almost had him jumping out of his skin. He span, and backed up immediately, pressing his back as far up against the pilot’s console as he possibly could. Talia had crept up on him in near-perfect silence, and, with a start he realised that she now held the data stick that would give them back control of the autopilot.

She held herself like a stalking tiger, confidence in her control of the situation supreme. A small smile played on her face, and she held a small, grey pistol with its barrel aimed directly between Malan’s eyes.

That should have scared him more than it did. What really had ice flooding through his veins were her eyes. Cerulean orbs that once swam with emotion looked straight past him, wide and wild. He could see the rift reflected in their depths, and could see the different emotions that it stirred in her. Curiosity and fear were there, but over everything else was adoration.

That frightened him more than any weapon ever could.

“W—What?” He mumbled finally, still desperately grasping around in his mind for solid ground to build some sort of rational plan upon.

“The Abyss? Isn’t it incredible? Creation itself consumed and unmade and given life again—the power of the Gods themselves,” she shuddered, before turning to him and using her free hand to tilt his head towards her, so she could look directly into his eyes. “But you of all people know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve seen the Abyss in all it’s majesty before.”

Malan’s teeth were grinding before she’d even finished speaking, and when she said her last, he had to consciously hold himself back from doing something stupid. Elena knew about the Jauda of course—as captain, she’d vetted him thoroughly before allowing him to join the crew. Beric had known through associates who’d been on board the Jauda when it happened, but he’d kept it quiet, if only to ensure Malan’s silence. Or at least, he’d believed that to be the case.

“Does everybody on this damn crew know about the Jauda?” he bit out, and Talia laughed.

“Did you really think you could keep something like that a secret? An Abyssal rift forming within a ship is the kind of nightmare fuel that the UGC news can’t help but shovel into everyone’s faces. But, for what it’s worth, I believe Thaddeus is still unaware. Now, sit yourself down at Beric’s station, Malan.”

He narrowed his eyes, glancing into the black abyss of the barrel of Talia’s weapon, and hesitating only a moment before doing as instructed. Talia got to work immediately, deftly binding each hand to the chair with fixture cable, keeping her weapon affixed onto him with her off-hand until she was sure he was secure.

“What the hell’s your plan here, Talia? What could you possibly gain from forcing us to fly towards a rift and getting torn apart?”

“Gain? Me?” She laughed again, before turning her eyes back towards the rift. “I’m not doing this for me. This is all for them. Everything I do is for them. And if you all do as you’re told, you are the only one that will die today, Malan.”

“What?” Malan blurted out, no longer able to hold back his bewilderment. “How do you figure that? They’ll kill everyone once we get close enough, just like they did on the Jauda! You being crazy enough to voluntarily get close enough for the Abyss to tear out your eyes, doesn’t mean they won’t!”

Her laughter grew in intensity, and she returned to his side, head cocked back until her laughter died away. Talia crouched next to him, all traces of mirth entirely absent and cupped his cheek with her hand.

“Poor, sweet, naïve Malan. Who do you think sent me?”

Malan’s mouth worked to speak, but no words came out, the full weight of her insanity crashing down upon him like a blow to the stomach

“I see the full understanding of the Abyss still eludes you,” her smile came back, dreamy and distant, as though she was no longer really talking to him at all. “The Abyss are no mindless beasts, they are simply the equal and opposite reaction to a corrupted, out-of-balance reality. They were here before creation itself, and they shall exist long after creation’s last, rattling breaths fade from memory.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“They are the Elder Ones, and their thirst knows no bounds. They have shown me the end of creation, and they have shown me how they will build it again from scratch. Free from corruption. Free from suffering. Do you understand, Malan? They did not just promise, they showed me. Each step along the path, and it’s end. What they envisage for us—I wept at it’s beauty. From that day, I swore I would give my life to see it come to pass, no matter the cost.”

Malan had given up trying to engage directly with Talia’s words. She had devolved fully into the mad ramblings of a zealot, and the idea of a sentient, even benevolent entity being behind what he’d seen on the Jauda almost had him laughing in incredulity.

What he couldn’t doubt, however, was that Talia believed, and that belief was horrifying to behold.

“Okay,” he said, mind trying to focus on the current situation. “But why me? Why am I the only one that has to die?”

“Oh, Malan. It’s because you’re special. You can see,” she tilted his head towards her again, allowing her to look into his eyes as she had before with that intense mixture of wonder and fear. “I can’t imagine what it must be like. To see the energies of creation. To watch them flee from the Abyss and be consumed. Glorious, to be sure. Someone like you being born hasn’t happened in hundreds of years. But someone like you being born who is also compatible with the Starbound? This is the first time. The Abyss had marked you as its own right from your very birth, Malan. It is your destiny.”

The word Starbound rang out through Malan’s mind clearer than any other, regardless of how twisted the rest of what Talia had to say was. Beric had been wrong of course, he hadn’t failed out of the Starbound testing program. It had been his dream to pilot one of those ships—to explore the reaches of space, and defended those that needed defending like the heros he’d watched growing up on the news. He’d spent his entire life working himself to the bone, pushing himself towards exactly that goal.

He’d been offered his opportunity to test for compatibility with a Starbound ship just before the Jauda had happened. It had been the happiest moment of his life. Then came the Jauda, and he and his dreams had fallen apart beneath the crushing weight of the guilt.

“I never took the test,” he muttered. “There’s no way to know if I’m compatible or not.”

Talia patted his cheek condescendingly. “You still don’t understand the power you’re dealing with, do you Malan? The Elder Ones can see it upon you, just as easily as the Nexus can. You are compatible. The Jauda may have been a failure in the end, but it at least confirmed that you are the one.”

Malan froze. “What do you mean, ‘the Jauda was a failure’?”

“Exactly what I said. Our first attempt at taking you aboard the Jauda failed,” she said. “For a time, I believed I had failed the Abyss entirely. All my efforts in vain as you became Starbound. But then,” she continued, giggling as she did. “You didn’t even go! Too racked with guilt and loss. I couldn’t believe my luck. From there it was easy to manipulate Vasquez into hiring you—she always liked down on her luck strays, all it took was a data-slate left conveniently open, and I had you again. Alone. Isolated. Easy prey.”

The sound of his own heartbeat thundered in his ears, and Malan could feel the telltale rush of hot blood surging through him. The fear had gone, replaced by all-consuming anger.

“You were behind the Jauda.” His words were short. Clipped. His arms strained instinctively against his bindings, and they dug into his wrists, drawing blood. It hadn’t been a question, but Talia responded as if it were.

“But of course. Low-paid technicians are so easy to bribe, especially when they can’t tell how what was asked of them would be helpful. Adjust a setting here. Manipulate the energy flow there. Tearing a rift in empty space is difficult, but around the celestial anomaly your father was poking around at, it took next to no effort at all. All it needed was somebody with your eyes to get a little too curious and poke around where they shouldn’t…”

His anger wavered, and Talia tutted and stood, stretching out her arms as she sauntered back to her station. “Oh, come now. You must know if you hadn’t fallen for our trap, we simply would have opened a rift another way, and everyone would have died, regardless. It was your fault, but your sin wasn’t your curiosity. It was simply existing.”

A crackle of sound burst from the comms system, and Elena’s voice stopped the both of them dead. “Malan. Talia. Report—how is progress? We’ll be squared away within the hour.”

Talia smiled and pressed her intercom button. “Good. We predict we’ll have access to the autopilot just before then.”

“Perfect,” Elena said. “Malan, do you concur?”

It was clever. Elena was ensuring that they were both still in place and working, and that one of them hadn’t turned on the other. However, the message on the screen in front of him destroyed any hope of summoning help from his captain and her rifle.

I have control of the door seals and airlocks. Report you are well. Create no suspicion. Failure to comply will leave me with no option but to seal this room and open up the rest of the ship. Three more will die horribly.

Thanks to you.

Malan swallowed. He could see the airlock controls on her monitor, even as Talia walked across to him and pressed his own intercom button. He bit back a curse before complying.

“We’re nearly there with the passwords—just under an hour is a solid estimate.”

Silence, then, “Good. Fantastic work you two, we might just make it out of this yet.”

The intercom clicked off, and Talia returned to her station, laughing louder than ever before. All Malan could do was strain fruitlessly against his restraints and stare at the approaching rift. Small ripples of movement had become black, leathery-winged shadows, pouring forth from the wound in the sky like demons, surging towards the nearby moons.

To his horror, deep in the shadowed depths of the portal, he saw something he didn’t recognise from the Jauda. A shape he could neither name nor describe, shifting and twisting so often it appeared to writhe, formless and vast enough that were it ever to take a step within their reality it would dwarf the planet below. Amongst all the movement, a single, bulbous eye came into view within the rift, oozing red and violet. It’s pupil swivelled, and in a heartbeat found Malan’s own, even from across the vastness of space.

Talia’s laughter took on a strange tone and rhythm, and it was only by the hot, tearing pain in his own throat that Malan realised he was screaming.