The dead planetoid shattered like a dropped porcelain cup.
Fifty leagues to the north, where the Sixth Star-Chain had held the mantle together for ten millennia, the iron crust buckled upward into jagged, sky-piercing ridges.
A colossal fissure—twenty leagues wide and weeping with green anti-matter magma—tore across the basalt plains straight toward the Spire of Binding.
From the depths of the planetary abyss came a sound that unmade the sanity of mortal men.
It was not a roar, but a deep-space seismic scream that vibrated through the tectonic plates, through the soles of their boots, and straight into the marrow of their bones.
The gravity of the entire region warped violently, pulling nearby asteroids out of orbit and slamming them into the surface in deafening concussive detonations.
Jormungandr-Null had opened its eyes.
Rising from the core of the broken planetoid came the head of the Primordial Leviathan.
It was larger than the city of Chicago—a titanic, serpent-like monstrosity forged from compressed black holes and jagged obsidian scales that dripped with boiling void-acid.
Four burning, pupilless eyes of sickly emerald anti-matter stared down at the surface, each eye the size of a mountain lake.
Around its colossal neck, the remaining seven Star-Chains groaned and shrieked, glowing white-hot as the beast thrashed against its ancient celestial bindings.
With a single, sluggish breath, the World-Eater inhaled the toxic nebular gas of Tartarus, creating a massive atmospheric vortex that began pulling the shattered fragments of the planetoid into its gaping, star-swallowing maw.
"Aurelius! Pull the fleet back!" Seraphina screamed into her etheric comm-link, holding tightly to the Scepter anchored in the altar.
Her twenty-foot wings of starlight burned at their brightest, anchoring their localized space against the terrifying gravitational suction.
"The atmospheric drag will tear the super-dreadnoughts apart! Hold perimeter at forty leagues and fire all long-range solar lances at its eyes!"
"High Queen, we cannot leave you on the surface!" Aurelius’s voice crackled through severe spatial static.
"That’s an order, General!" she commanded, her amber eyes blazing with sovereign fury. "Get them clear!"
Beside her, Kaelen stood like an immovable mountain of dark-matter amidst the howling storm of basalt and acid rain.
His eighty-foot shadow-wings wrapped protectively around Seraphina, deflecting falling boulders the size of cathedrals with thunderous cracks of void-gravity.
His face was streaked with soot and blood, his jaw locked in feral, predatory focus as he stared up at the cosmic titan towering over them.
"Seven chains remain," Kaelen rumbled, his voice cutting through the roar of the apocalypse.
"If it snaps two more, the Leviathan will enter slip space and consume the ring-world of Aurelia within hours. We cannot kill a beast that swallows stars, Seraphina... not from the outside."
Seraphina turned to him, the clinical, decisive logic of a trauma paramedic clicking into place in an instant.
You don't treat an internal hemorrhage by pressing on the skin. You go to the source.
"Its mouth," she said, her amber eyes locking onto his molten silver gaze.
"When it inhales the nebular gas to charge its anti-matter breath, its throat conduits are exposed. The internal biological core has no adamantine armor. If we plant the Solar Dynamo of Ra directly into its heart-valve, we can induce a cardiac singularity from within."
Kaelen stared at her for a split second, the sheer, suicidal audacity of the plan hanging between them.
Then, a slow, wild, dangerously breathtaking smile broke across his blood-stained face.
"Diving straight into the gullet of a World-Eater," Kaelen growled huskily, his hands coming around her waist, pulling her flush against his armored chest despite the crumbling ground beneath them.
His molten silver eyes burned with raw, untamed reverence.
"There is no one else in all the realms mad enough to be my Queen."
He leaned down, his mouth crushing hers in a fierce, breathless, deeply possessive kiss amidst the collapsing world.
The taste of his lips—metallic, sweet, and searing with dark-matter fire—banished every shred of doubt from her soul.
They broke apart, gasping, their hands locking together in an unbreakable grip of dawn and shadow.
High above them, Jormungandr-Null reared its mountain-sized head, its colossal jaws unhinging to unleash a torrent of green anti-matter fire that would vaporize the planetoid.
"Now, Kaelen!" Seraphina cried.
With a unified roar that defied the dying world, they launched into the sky, riding a blinding slipstream of starlight and void-gravity straight into the roaring, gaping maw of the beast.