Chapter 118 · Void

The purrgil’s ion trail carried them farther than Eli expected — past the last scattered fragments of the wreckfield, past the faint curl of dust and metallic particulates that clung to the outer ring, and into a wedge of space that felt oddly uninhabited. The Faded Glory glided through the narrowing corridor of debris until even the silent wreckage fell behind them.

The trail thinned into a faint shimmer. Then into nothing at all.

Eli tapped the console. “I’ve lost it.”

Stent didn’t respond. He nudged their heading forward, slow and steady, as if trusting momentum more than the readouts.

The stars ahead grew sparse. Then sparser still.

Eli frowned and zoomed the display. “What…? I’m not picking up any systems in this vector. Nothing charted. Nothing uncharted. Just—”

He stopped.

The scanners reported vacuum. Not empty space. Not low-density interstellar medium.

A pocket of pure absence. A region without scatter, without dust, without radiation, without anything at all.

“Stent,” Eli said slowly, “this sector is dead.”

Stent’s grip on the controls tightened by a fraction. “Proceed.”

Eli adjusted the sensors again. They flickered at the edges, struggling to map anything beyond a faint haze of background dark energy. He expanded the scan radius. The screen flattened into static before reassembling into the same blank field.

“Stent… nothing should be this empty.”

“Yes,” Stent said.

The tone made Eli turn.

A long, quiet breath. A single blink. A shift in posture so small most people would’ve missed it.

But Eli knew the signs. This was recognition. And memory. And fear.

“You’ve seen this before,” Eli whispered.

“I have read of it,” Stent corrected, though his voice had grown taut. “From the expeditionary logs of Chiss explorers who ventured deep into the Chaos, far beyond the navigable lanes. They described regions without matter. Without light. Without geometry.”

Eli swallowed. “You’re saying this is one of those places?”

Stent didn’t answer immediately.

Instead he dimmed their forward lights, allowing the black to settle against the canopy with full weight. The void was so complete that Eli felt his breath catch — not from fear of the dark, but from the sense of falling into it.

The instruments trembled once. Then again.

Eli glanced at the readings. “We’re getting interference.”

“No,” Stent murmured. “Not interference. Pressure.”

“Pressure? From what? There’s nothing—”

The screen flashed. Every sensor band lit up at once — red, gold, white — then snapped back to zero.

Eli’s pulse slammed hard in his chest. “What was that?”

Stent didn’t blink. “Dark energy resonance. A fold. And it was generated intentionally.”

Eli stared at the blank forward view, a cold ache building behind his ribs.

The purrgil hadn’t just vanished into the void.

It had led them here. To this place. To this silence.

Something pulsed through the emptiness — not energy, not gravity, not sound — and Eli felt the hairs rise along his arms.

The sensors blinked off. Every indicator dimmed.

The ship drifted into a region without stars.

And the trail was gone.

Gone completely.

Eli whispered, “Stent… we’ve lost it.”

Stent’s reply came soft, but not gentle. “We have arrived.”

The Faded Glory had withdrawn to the edge of the wreckfield, keeping the densest cluster of debris at a respectful distance. Beyond the canopy, twisted fragments of the Seventh Fleet drifted through the darkness in slow, endless procession, turning with the patient rhythm of things that no longer belonged to time.

The engines idled at minimum output.

For the first time since entering the graveyard, the ship was still.

Stent finished reviewing the last sensor recording before setting the datapad aside.

"We have been operating for nearly sixteen hours," he said quietly.

Eli rubbed at his eyes without looking up from the navigation console.

"I noticed."

"Our judgement will deteriorate if we continue."

Eli gave a tired huff.

"So that's your way of saying we should sleep."

"It is my recommendation."

Eli leaned back in the co-pilot's chair, staring once more at the distorted waveform frozen across the display. Even motionless, it seemed to resist being understood.

"I don't want to lose the trail."

"We will not."

"You don't know that."

"No," Stent admitted. "I do not."

The answer surprised Eli enough that he looked over.

Stent met his gaze with the same composed expression he always carried.

"The wreckfield is not moving with sufficient velocity to alter our relative position significantly over the next several hours. If the phenomenon remains, we will locate it again."

"And if it doesn't?"

Stent was silent for a moment.

"Then continuing while exhausted would not have changed the outcome."

There was nothing to argue with.

Eli sighed.

"I hate it when you're reasonable."

"I am aware."

A corner of Eli's mouth twitched despite himself.

He powered down the main displays, leaving only passive sensors and proximity alarms active. The cockpit dimmed until only the faint blue glow of standby indicators remained.

"I'll take four hours."

"I will wake you sooner if necessary."

Eli stood, stretching muscles that protested every movement.

"What about you?"

"I will also rest."

That, somehow, sounded less believable.

They settled into the familiar rhythm of a ship at rest. Somewhere beyond the bulkheads, coolant moved through aging conduits with a muted murmur, while the hull answered the occasional touch of drifting debris with soft metallic echoes that barely disturbed the silence. After so many months aboard, Eli had stopped hearing those sounds individually. Together they had become something closer to breathing—a quiet reminder that, despite everything they had witnessed, the old freighter was still carrying them forward.

Sleep, however, proved considerably less cooperative.

He had barely undressed before lying back across the wide bed that occupied most of the former captain's quarters. The room had always felt disproportionately spacious compared to the rest of the ship, a relic from whatever more comfortable life the Faded Glory had enjoyed before becoming little more than two stubborn travelers and an astromech chasing ghosts across the galaxy. Tonight, the extra space only made the room feel emptier.

Each time Eli closed his eyes, the same images returned with perfect clarity. The impossible folds in space. The immense silhouette emerging from beneath the wreckage. The slow, deliberate gaze of a creature that had looked directly at them—not with curiosity, nor with hostility, but with the unsettling certainty of something that had already decided they belonged inside its story.

He turned onto one side with an exasperated sigh, hoping movement alone might quiet his thoughts.

It did not.

A faint electronic trill drifted through the open doorway before Tee rolled cautiously into the cabin, his photoreceptor dimmed to little more than a soft blue glow. The little droid paused just inside, tilting his dome in a way that had long ago ceased to feel mechanical.

Eli smiled despite himself.

"I know," he murmured. "I'm supposed to be sleeping."

Tee answered with a sequence of doubtful chirps that sounded suspiciously like disagreement.

"So much for fooling you."

The droid rolled closer until he reached the side of the bed. Eli let one hand fall absentmindedly onto the polished dome, running his fingers across the familiar scratches the little astromech had accumulated over months of travel.

"We found them," he said quietly, more to himself than to Tee. After a moment, he corrected the thought with a weary smile. "Or maybe... they found us."

The words lingered in the room.

When they had set course for Lothal, everything had seemed almost reassuringly simple. Find the Chimaera. Find Thrawn. Bring him home. Instead, every answer had peeled away another layer of certainty until the galaxy itself no longer resembled the one Eli thought he understood. The Grysk. The Ascendancy. Creatures that crossed hyperspace as effortlessly as breathing. Somehow the search had grown larger with every step, until Thrawn's disappearance no longer felt like the mystery they were trying to solve, but only the first loose thread of something immeasurably older.

His eyes drifted toward the corridor.

As always, Stent had left the door to his small cabin open. Beyond the threshold there was only darkness, enough to hide whether the Chiss had actually gone to sleep or was still awake somewhere inside, reading through sensor logs for the hundredth time. Eli realized, not for the first time, that he genuinely had no idea how—or even if—Stent slept.

"I don't know how he does it," he murmured.

Tee answered with a soft whistle but made no attempt to leave. He simply remained beside the bed, keeping the same quiet vigil he always seemed to adopt whenever Eli's thoughts wandered somewhere they shouldn't.

After a while, the steady presence of the little astromech accomplished what exhaustion alone could not. Eli felt the tension slowly begin to drain from his shoulders, his breathing settling into an easier rhythm as the endless questions finally loosened their grip.

Just before sleep claimed him, he managed a tired whisper.

"If he starts the engines..."

Tee answered with a single affirmative chirp.

It was the last thing Eli heard before the darkness finally became sleep.

A faint metallic click stirred him from sleep.

Eli didn't know how long he had been asleep. Long enough that the fog of exhaustion had retreated, but not enough for his thoughts to feel entirely his own. For a few seconds he simply lay still, listening.

Another sound.

Not an alarm. Tools. Someone carefully removing an access panel.

He pushed himself upright.

The cabin was dim, illuminated only by the amber glow of the ship's secondary lighting. Not the harsh crimson of a critical emergency, nor the bright white of normal operations, but the subdued lighting the Faded Glory automatically adopted whenever non-essential systems were temporarily offline.

Something had happened.

The ship felt unusually quiet. Even the engines idled with a lower, more deliberate cadence, as though Stent had reduced them to the minimum power necessary to hold position among the drifting wreckage.

Another muted clink reached him from the cockpit.

Eli rounded the corner.

The forward access panel beneath the navigation console lay open, exposing bundles of cable and half the ship's aging circuitry. Stent was kneeling beside it, sleeves rolled neatly above his wrists, one hand holding a diagnostic probe while the other adjusted a cluster of connectors with the same patient precision Eli had watched him apply to everything from star charts to field dressings.

Beside him, Tee extended one of his utility arms into the compartment, holding a light exactly where Stent needed it. Another arm presented a replacement relay.

Without looking away from the wiring, Stent accepted it. "Thank you."

The little astromech answered with an almost cheerful chirp before rotating his dome to illuminate another section of the panel. It looked like Stent had finally accepted the droid’s presence. Some weeks ago he would had been working on his own, not allowing Tee to help him.

Eli leaned against the cockpit entrance for a moment, quietly watching the unlikely partnership. "I was beginning to think you two preferred working without me."

Neither of them startled.

Stent merely glanced over one shoulder. "You are awake."

"I gathered as much." He looked around the cockpit. "The lights."

"A power distribution relay degraded during the night," Stent replied, returning his attention to the exposed circuitry. "The primary grid remains operational, but I disconnected several secondary systems while replacing it."

"So... not an emergency."

"No." A pause. "A maintenance inconvenience."

Eli let out the quiet breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "I'll take inconvenience."

He crouched beside them, looking into the open compartment. "What failed?"

Stent shifted slightly to make room without interrupting his work. "The relay was already approaching the end of its service life. Yesterday's interference accelerated the process."

Eli nodded. "Anything else damaged?"

"Nothing we cannot repair."

Tee punctuated the statement with an optimistic whistle.

Eli smiled. "For once, I'd like to hear one of you say, 'Everything is perfectly fine.'"

Stent considered that for just long enough to suggest he had taken the request literally. "It would be inaccurate."

Eli laughed quietly. "Of course it would."

For a brief moment, the cockpit settled into a comfortable silence broken only by the soft sounds of tools, the low hum of the environmental systems, and Tee's occasional electronic commentary as Stent completed the repair.

Then the relay seated itself with a crisp metallic click.

The emergency lighting blinked once. Twice.

The cockpit brightened as the primary illumination returned.

Stent secured the access panel and rose smoothly to his feet. "The repair is complete."

Eli stretched the stiffness from his shoulders. "So..." He glanced through the canopy toward the silent graveyard waiting beyond. "...shall we go find whatever decided to rewrite the laws of the universe?"

Stent rested one hand on the pilot's chair. "Yes." His eyes remained fixed on the drifting wreckage ahead. "It is waiting."