The interior of the five-mile crystalline heart was turning into an incandescent supernova.
Fissures of blinding white-gold dawn fire raced across the obsidian chamber walls, shattering the ancient bio-organic matrices into weeping shards of crystal.
The Solar Dynamo of Ra pulsed at the center of the anti-matter nexus like an artificial sun undergoing gravitational collapse, its five-thousand-degree solar flare vaporizing the corrosive acid pools in deafening bursts of superheated steam.
Seraphina stumbled as the deck convulsed violently beneath her boots.
The cardiac chasm was shrieking—a subterranean, psychic death-howl that shook the fillings in her teeth and threatened to tear her etheric channels apart.
The bone iris of the atrial valve was three-quarters closed, the jagged edges of calcified armor locking down to trap her inside the detonating core.
Then a massive, gauntleted hand of weeping dark-matter punched through the narrowing gap.
Kaelen seized the two-foot-thick bone plates with both hands, his eighty-foot shadow-wings flaring with pure, localized void-gravity behind him.
Veins bulged along his neck and forearms, his jaw clenched in agonizing, feral exertion as he physically pried the snapping valve open by sheer sovereign will.
"Seraphina! Jump!" his roar shattered the roar of the dying organ.
Seraphina didn't hesitate.
Engaging her twenty-foot wings of starlight in an explosive, single-beat burst of speed, she launched herself upward through the boiling vapor.
She cleared the threshold just as the bone plates snapped shut behind her with the concussive force of an artillery shell.
Kaelen caught her in mid-air.
The kinetic momentum hurled them across the vast chasm, crashing into the severed carcass of the Prime Core-Wurm.
Kaelen took the brunt of the impact, his heavy armor absorbing the blow against the dead beast’s star-metal scales while keeping Seraphina tightly shielded against his chest.
For a heartbeat, they lay tangled together in the choking mist.
Kaelen looked down at her, his molten silver eyes wild with adrenaline, relief, and a terrifying, hungry pride.
His face was streaked with black ichor and ash, but the grin on his lips was devastatingly wicked.
"You really cut it close that time, little sun," he rumbled breathlessly against her cheek, his chest heaving under her hands.
Seraphina let out a breathless, half-wild laugh, her fingers gripping the battered plate of his shoulder.
"I told you I'd plant the seed, Vance. Now we run!"
Above them, the five-mile heart of Jormungandr-Null fractured completely.
A blinding, cataclysmic detonation ripped through the center of the leviathan.
The bilious green anti-matter collapsed in upon itself, replaced by a roaring sphere of pure thermonuclear dawn that expanded outward at astronomical speed, vaporizing vascular conduits, bone arches, and parasite hives alike.
The colossal serpent went into violent, terminal convulsions.
Miles above them, its throat collapsed as the beast’s dying nervous system triggered a massive regurgitation reflex.
"Hold on to me!" Kaelen shouted.
He wrapped his left arm around her waist, locking her flush against his hips, while his right hand drove Gloom-Weaver into the floor to anchor them against the ascending shockwave.
Then, sensing the kinetic wave of expanding solar gas, Kaelen did the unthinkable: he released the anchor and inverted his gravity field.
Instead of fighting the explosion, they rode it.
The thermonuclear shockwave caught their combined dual-aura, launching them up the collapsing throat like a shell fired from an orbital cannon.
They shot past miles of crumbling bone ribs and burning flesh, breaking through the leviathan's shattering teeth and erupting into the open void of Tartarus inside a towering geyser of white-gold fire.
Behind them, the head of Jormungandr-Null disintegrated in an expanding sphere of solar annihilation.
The remaining seven Star-Chains snapped under the immense concussive force, the mountain-sized links scattering into the dark nebula as the World-Eater's colossal carcass collapsed into a harmless cloud of glittering stardust.
Floating together in the zero-gravity expanse of the nebula, forty leagues from the blast, Kaelen pulled Seraphina against his breastplate.
His breathing was ragged, his hands trembling with residual etheric exhaustion, but his gaze was absolute.
He cupped her face in both gauntlets, tilting her head back to look into her amber eyes.
"We did it," he whispered, his voice thick with raw, overwhelming reverence. "You slew the World-Eater, Seraphina."
Seraphina smiled, her eyes shining with quiet tears of relief.
She leaned up, pressing her lips to his in a deep, desperate, all-consuming kiss that tasted of victory, ash, and the eternal dawn.
Kaelen groaned deep in his throat, pulling her closer, deepening the kiss until the cold expanse around them was forgotten in the blazing heat of their mate-bond.
When they finally broke apart, General Aurelius’s voice chimed through the comm-channel, trembling with awe:
"High Queen... Grand Marshal... the nebula is clearing. Look ahead. The lair of the Void-Mother... has been revealed."