Giant bees with brass splints on their legs rested on colossal flower heads. Others with mended wings took short, supervised flights, their buzzing a determined thrum beneath the gaze of their Gnome handlers.

  They had brought Bomber out of the Vet’s Guild Hive-Tower into the warm afternoon sun. The Giant Moth lay on its stretcher. Its magnificent wing, once a crumpled ruin, was now stretched taut in a delicate, web-like lattice of metal and sinew-thread.

  A dark-skinned Gnome with tight curls made a final adjustment to a tension screw. She peered at her work through a pair of comically oversized safety goggles.

  “The wing has set,” she said, giving the brass lattice a confident tap.

  “It’ll need another week of rest for the sinew to re-knit, but Bomber will fly again. Good as new.”

  The words lifted a weight from Trenn’s shoulders. He reached for Bomber’s fuzz, stopped, remembering the blinding powder.

  The vet gave them a crisp nod and moved on, leaving them alone in the quiet garden. It was a rare moment.

  “I’ve missed this,” Trenn said, his voice quiet. “Having you around.”

  Mara’s hunter-like analysis of the vets ceased. She went still, her head turning slowly. Her amber eyes fixed on him.

  “Trenn… Our time fighting the Goblins is over. I’m a Guardian of the Mana Forest, and you’re leaving for the mainland. We are not a team anymore.”

  A sad smile touched Trenn’s lips. His gaze shifted from her intense stare back to Bomber’s resting form. “No?” he asked softly. “I suppose not. We’re… friends. I like having you around. And you like having me around. Or else, why would you even be here?”

  The tension in her tightened. “I came to see Bomber,” she answered after a moment of hesitation.

  “Right, Bomber. You two are so close, after all.”

  A rumble started deep in her chest. “You’re an idiot.”

  The Grand Library was a quiet, cavernous space with large double doors and ceilings that “soared” to a low six feet, which made it one of the few buildings Mara and Trenn could access in the Hive—provided they crawled and squeezed through the entrance.

  The air was dry, thick with the scent of old parchment and polished brass.

  The heavy, brass-bound tables were so low that they had to kneel to study the documents laid out before them.

  The first print revealed a star, trapped in a metallic cage whose total mass must dwarf that of a hundred thousand suns.

  Mara traced the intricate lines of the print. "Our stories say the structure is so massive that it traps the star with its own gravity. The cage harnesses the star's entire solar output, funneling that energy into its reactors and propulsion systems." Her claw tapped the print for emphasis. "Those systems move everything together—the structure, the star it holds captive, and every planet locked in their orbit."

  Her claw slid a second print into the light. It showed the same engine, but this time, fifty planets were locked in orbit around it. A detailed cutaway showed one of the worlds physically slotting into a vast, planet-sized channel in the engine’s superstructure.

  Trenn held his breath as comprehension dawned. “They're… plugging into it."

  "Every factory, every power grid, every ounce of their orbital momentum is put to work," a Gnome librarian confirmed, his tone flat as stone. "The fifty worlds are the engine's living nervous system. They slave away to power its senses, to navigate its course, and to hunt its prey as it hurtles through the void at a speed that outpaces the expansion of the universe itself."

  Mara and Trenn looked at the librarian with blank expressions.

  Mara slid the final, stark print into the center of the table. It was a star-chart. A single, unwavering line was drawn across it. In its wake, like a trail of ash, were dozens of greyed-out, lifeless worlds.

  "Their protocol is simple: search and destroy," the librarian said.

  "To them, a planet with a Mana Forest is a weed in the garden of the void," Mara said, her voice dropping. "And the Shears are gardeners, come to tend it with unstoppable, single-minded purpose. They are the Mana Tree’s greatest foe."

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  The librarian tapped the star-chart. "They always target the closest world with a Mana Forest that they can reach without slowing down. Preserving their momentum is their unbreakable law. The sheer mass of the structure, a star, and fifty worlds… accelerating the Stellar-Ship must’ve taken eons. If they slowed down, it would take millennia to build that speed again."

  "They will not stop for your world, Trenn. They will not even slow down," Mara said.

  "When they are close enough, they will release a legion of their war drones—expendable units abandoned to the task of scouring your home with poison and war.”

  "And the Stellar-Ship will continue, already hunting for its next target," finished the librarian.

  The weight of the star-charts followed them through the quiet, crystal-lit tunnels of the Burrow. There were no words for a moving star system, for a trail of dead worlds, for a home that was next on the list.

  When they reached Trenn's quarters, Mara followed him inside. She moved to the hearth, took out a whetstone, and the rhythmic shink-shink-shink of stone on her claws began to fill the room.

  Trenn, however, could not settle. His boots wore a path in the stone floor.

  He stopped at the table where he had left his gear. His hand hovered and settled on the black amulet. He picked it up, its heavy weight a familiar and unsettling presence in his palm. Ezy’s tear-streaked face flashed in his mind, and guilt cut through the cosmic horror.

  "You're going to wear a trench in the floor," Mara stated, her voice a low rumble.

  Trenn closed his hand around the amulet. "Tyndral said this was attuned to Darkness," he murmured, his thoughts drifting. "It feels... empty. Like it's waiting."

  "All tools are empty until a hand gives them purpose," Mara replied, growling. She paused, her amber eyes finally lifting to meet his. "You're always reading too much into things. Elemental Darkness, as a Mana Attunement, is just that: the absence of Light. It's not inherently evil or a corrupting force. We Guardians use Darkness Attuned Mana to slip between shadows unnoticed."

  But the nature of Darkness was a distant concern, overshadowed by a more immediate weight.

  "She would have won," Trenn admitted, his voice quiet. "Her machine was better. I used a power she couldn't have anticipated."

  A long, weary sigh escaped Mara. "Trenn," she said, setting the whetstone down with a soft click. "That power you used? That 'unfair' trick? That's the reason we are sitting in this room. It's what kept the Goblins from tearing me apart on that battlefield. It's what kept the Warlord from crushing your skull."

  She stood up, crossing the small space to stand before him. "War isn't a Gnomish duel with rules and flags. It is a fight to the death. You used a superior weapon. You survived. We survived. That is called victory."

  She placed a hand on his shoulder, her claws carefully retracted, her grip grounding him in the present. "Stop punishing yourself for being strong."

  He gave her a weak, grateful nod, but the guilt remained, a stone in his gut.

  With a quiet sigh, she returned to her sharpening. The case was closed.

  His gaze drifted from the amulet to the vast, humming city beyond the window. He got lost in his thoughts. The Shears. Earth. His family, his friends, blissfully unaware that the gardeners of the void were on their way to weed them from existence.

  His mind drifted to Tyndral, snapping him out of his reverie.

  He drew a ragged breath, shoving the guilt into a deep recess of his mind. There would be time for it later.

  His senses were a net cast wide across the city, each thread vibrating with the untamed hum of his own power. The world appeared in breathtaking detail. The deep, resonant thump of a late-night forge in the Burrow reached him.

  Ezy’s voice. Screaming. Sobbing?

  "They rejected the Stomper! They wrote..." Ezy's voice was thick with tears, each word a struggle against the grief that was strangling her. "They wrote that the contract and the lab time were dependent on the Stomper's victory, and since… since…"

  He should never have used the amulet. Ezy would’ve won. Her project would’ve had the green light. He had seen the Stomper in action. It was a powerful war machine—a potential game-changer for the Hive's defense. But the council would never see that now because of him.

  He shook his head. Another ghost to haunt his quiet moments. He tried to regain his focus. He was not here to dwell. He needed focus.

  The buzz of the Hive was all around him. He didn’t want to hear them anymore. He needed quiet. He pushed his sight and hearing outwards again.

  They hurtled through the sleeping Hive, past the crystal-lit Burrow, across the dreaming flower valley, and through the ancient trees. His consciousness flew through the pine woods and out toward the beach, where twin moons cast their overlapping light on the churning water.

  This was where it all began. He anchored his senses to the rhythmic crash of the waves, letting the steady sound wash over the empty stretch of moonlit sand. A profound calm settled over his projected consciousness.

  A startling silhouette cut from the darkness—a void in the shape of a person that swallowed the moonlight.

  It sensed Trenn’s invisible gaze and turned. A single eye opened in the center of its featureless head. It looked at him. At Trenn, through his own Clairvoyance. Trenn, petrified, could watch as the hole in reality raised an arm and pointed a finger, down, towards the waters.

  The gesture brutally displaced Trenn’s senses. The beach vanished.

  He was in a wide, ancient pathway inside a tunnel deep beneath the seafloor. The path was partially flooded, the still water reflecting the faint light of phosphorescent moss. His gaze followed the flooded stones forward, tracing their length into the gloom.

  Trenn turned to face a fifty-yard-long crocodile, its scales glittering with encrusted gold and gemstones.

  Startled, his senses slammed back into his body. He gasped, lungs burning, heart hammering against his ribs. He was drenched in sweat, and his body trembled with profound terror.

  His gaze fell to his own hand. It was a knot of tension, his knuckles bone-white from the force of his grip on the black amulet at his neck.

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