The Eclipse barriers shattered like glass sculpted from dying stars, their crimson light bleeding into the void as reality reasserted its natural chaos. In the reinforced nursery aboard Arbiter's Legacy, five-year-old Kaedon Morgenstern sat perfectly still, his small hands pressed against his temples as tears of liquid starlight rolled down his cheeks. Around him, the air itself wept—not metaphorically, but with actual droplets of crystallized sorrow that fell upward, defying physics in their grief.
"I can hear them all," he whispered, his voice carrying harmonics that made the quantum-steel walls groan. "Every thought, every dream, every... every last thought before they stop thinking forever."
