They struck the open observation platform atop the Nether-Void’s armored bridge tower like a binary star plunging into the abyss.
Seraphina hit the deck first, her white dragon-scale armor absorbing the kinetic impact as her twenty-foot wings of starlight flared wide, incinerating the thick sheets of nitrogen frost beneath her boots.
Beside her, Kaelen descended with the crushing weight of a localized singularity, his eighty-foot shadow-wings blacking out the cold starlight of the Kuiper Belt.
The reinforced adamantine deck groaned and buckled beneath their combined arrival, spiderwebs of deep fractures radiating thirty paces across the iron plating.
Standing at the apex of the raised command dais was Dread-Lord Malakor.
The master of the Black Armada was a nightmare of ancient, corrupted nobility. Standing twelve feet tall, his body was an unholy fusion of desiccated immortal flesh and weeping abyssal soul-iron.
Four hollow, burning sockets of sickly green anti-matter stared out from beneath a spiked obsidian horned helm. In his four clawed hands, he wielded the Scourge of the Void-Mother—a massive, barbed four-headed flail whose spiked heads were forged from miniature collapsing black holes, spinning with lethal, devouring gravitational drag.
"You arrogant children of the dying light!" Malakor’s voice thundered like grinding boulders across the vacuum, transmitted through pure psychic pressure that set Seraphina’s teeth aching.
"You broke the hounds! You broke the web! But I am the First Hand of the Maw! I stood beside the Void-Mother when your ancestors' empire was drowned in ash!"
Malakor whipped the four-headed scourge forward.
The miniature black holes on the chains screamed through the thin atmosphere, tearing four yawning rifts in space-time as they converged straight for Seraphina's throat.
Kaelen didn't hesitate.
"Get behind me!" the High Sovereign roared.
He intercepted the strike in mid-air. Gloom-Weaver flared with blinding, violet dark-matter lightning as Kaelen brought the massive broadsword up in a two-handed diagonal parry.
The collision of broadsword and gravitational flail detonated with the force of an orbital warhead.
The concussive shockwave ripped away the bridge’s iron handrails, throwing Kaelen back three paces, his armored boots carving deep furrows through the solid adamantine floor. Blood trickled from his lip, but his molten silver eyes burned with feral, unyielding ecstasy.
"Your mother was an abomination, and you are a relic waiting for the grave!" Kaelen snarled, his shadow-wings wrapping around the chains of the scourge, siphoning the gravitational pull straight into his own core.
With Malakor’s weapon momentarily tangled in Kaelen’s wings, Seraphina launched into the air.
Her paramedic instincts found the anatomical flaw in a heartbeat: The heart-core beneath the soul-iron ribcage. High vascularization of anti-matter conduits.
Seraphina drew her sunstone recurve bow to full draw, hovering ten paces above the duel.
She poured the full, thermonuclear fury of the Solar Dynamo of Rain to a single, multi-faceted arrow of pure dawn fire.
Twang.
The arrow streaked through the freezing air like a beam of pure sunlight, striking the left clavicle of Malakor’s armor.
The celestial explosion blew away his outer breastplate, revealing the writhing, black-matter heart pulsing within his ribs.
Malakor shrieked—a psychic howl that caused the dreadnought’s engines to shudder.
He ripped his scourge free from Kaelen’s wings, raising his massive clawed back-hand to crush Seraphina out of the sky.
He never finished the swing.
Kaelen Vance materialized on the dreadnought's raised throne behind him.
The High Sovereign had used the momentary opening to enter the dark-matter stream. Rising to his full, towering height, Kaelen brought Gloom-Weaver down in a brutal, two-handed vertical execution cleave.
"For my Queen!" Kaelen’s sovereign roar shattered the silence of the cosmos.
The dark-matter blade severed Dread-Lord Malakor clean in half from his horned helm down to his iron waist.
The monster’s desiccated halves split apart, spraying thick, boiling black ichor across the bridge before the exposed black-matter heart began to collapse in on itself in a violent, imploding singularity.
"Core breach! We're jumping!" Kaelen shouted, his arm wrapping around Seraphina’s waist as he pulled her out of the sky.
Seraphina locked her arms around his neck, her starlight wings wrapping tightly around his shadow-wings.
Together, they unleashed a combined repulsor burst of starlight and void-gravity, launching themselves into the open vacuum just as the six-mile Nether-Void imploded behind them in a blinding, silent sphere of violet annihilation.
Floating weightlessly in the quiet starlight of the Kuiper Belt, Kaelen held Seraphina tight against his chest.
His breathing was ragged, his armor scorched and bleeding, but his silver eyes looked down at her with breathtaking, triumphant reverence.
He leaned in, capturing her lips in a fierce, breathless, deeply sensual kiss that tasted of victory, iron, and eternal dawn. Seraphina buried her hands in his hair, kissing him back with all the wild, untamed passion burning in her veins.
When they broke apart, smiling softly at each other against the backdrop of the stars, General Aurelius’s voice chimed through their comm-channel:
"High Queen! The enemy fleet has broken! The Kuiper Gate is secured... and the gate’s ancestral stargate is activating!"