Hathor was lost. She'd never admit it, but she was.

After that apparently Creation-wide shockwave, she and her friends had stuck around on Thara to help with rescue and recovery. Thankfully, damage had been fairly minimal and there were no deaths nor missing people, only a wide variety of small injuries which were quickly fixed. That had been yesterday.

Now they were on Nox. They were only here because Amneris asked them. And it was possible that Hathor was maybe worried about her brother. Just a little. She'd only known him for a little over a year, but she knew it wasn't like him to never call back. So, here they were, on Nox, searching for an underground bunker Hathor had forgotten the directions to.

"Just admit you're lost," Maddie said, lounging on a boulder.

"I'm not lost."

"Totally lost," Imogene called, going to sit beside Maddie.

"I'm not lost. The entrance is around here. Somewhere . . ."

Why did secret bunkers had to be so damn hard to find? And how was it no one else ever got lost on the way here? Then again, there was always someone to guide them every other time and now they were trying to find it on their own. Great plan, Hathor scolded herself.

"You guys lost?"

"We are not lost!" Hathor exclaimed, turning. "Oh. Um, hi." She was standing face-to-face with Mel.

Mel smiled. "Hello to you, too. Come on in."

The ground beneath them moved, creating a ramp down into the ground.

Hathor stormed ahead of her friends. "Told you we weren't lost." She ignored their muffled laughter.

The bunker looked pretty much the same as the last time they were there, only with a few additions. Now that the group got visitors on a more-or-less regular basis, there were more seating options. There was even a rug under the lounges, covering the entirety of the small living area, and a few more storage areas in the kitchen.

Troy counted the group before them. "I thought there were ten of you. Where's the other four?"

"We don't know," Sol answered.

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"We were investigating a phenomenon in a nearby system which happened shortly after the weirdest planetary quake ever," Mel said. "Shorty after they reached it, Horus, Selina, Jax and Jinx vanished. We haven't been able to reach them since."

"Two things," Sky said. "One: that was a Creation-wide quake, not planet-wide. Two: what happened just before they vanished?"

"Horus yelled something about a Void Beast." Brayden shrugged. "Never heard of them."

If Hathor's heart was beating, she thought it would've stopped there and then. "He yelled something about Void Beasts then vanished?"

"Pretty much."

"Oh, Gods!" She collapsed on the lounge, hand over her mouth.

Troy sat beside her, placing his arm around her shoulders. "Come on, Hathy. That doesn't mean for sure that he's—"

"What else could it mean!"

Iridia braced her hands on her hips. "If someone doesn't start explaining things soon, I will no longer be held responsible for my actions."

"Do you know what the Void is?" Imogene asked. They all shook their heads. "Right. Sky, you're up."

"The Void is the place outside Creation and home to the Void Beasts, anti-matter beings which sometimes enter our worlds," Sky explained. "Think of it as the emptiness surrounding everything we know."

"Thought that was a myth," Kindra murmured, moving to sit on Hathor's other side.

"It's not. It's very real but inaccessible to us."

"Except for under extremely unlikely situations," Maddie added. "Those are pretty rare."

Brayden nodded. "These Void Beasts took our mates to the Void?"

"Exactly."

"Okay, so we go get them out of the Void."

"If only it were that easy," Isaiah said from where he leaned against the wall. "We have no way of accessing it and, assuming we did, there is no way to know if we would survive with so much anti-matter."

"Right," Sky agreed. "We're all made of matter. The Void has a shit-load of anti-matter so it's pretty safe to assume we'd all be torn to pieces."

"Except for Hathy," Troy said. "She's immortal." Isaiah and Sky grimaced. "You're fucking joking."

Sky shook his head. "Afraid not. Immortality is no guarantee of survival. No one knows how things work in the Void."

"According to the Chronicles, it goes against everything we know here," Isaiah added. "There is no guarantee anyone would make a round trip, unless they were very strong."

Imogene snorted. "Gee, I wonder if we know anyone like that."

"Even mum might not make it," Hathor said quietly.

Kindra voiced what they all thought. "Fuck."

"What do we do?" Brayden asked.

Valria and Troy jumped to their feet, looking up at the roof. In unison, they growled.

Mel rubbed their back of their neck. "I guess first we see what's got the Shifters upset."

* * * * * * * *

The group dashed topside, following Valria and Troy as they ran across the grasslands. They moved so fast, the others struggled to keep up. There was no way to know where they were going or why, only that they were going somewhere. They came to a stop at a cliff overlooking Nox's wide, blue ocean. The two Shifters stared at the sky. The others followed their gaze.

There was something wrong with the sky. It looked like it was . . . fracturing. There were bright white cracks in the sky, as though someone had taken glass and smashed it on the ground. The cracks didn't appear to do anything other than just be there, but there was no way that was that case.

Mel pulled their phone from her pocket, holding it up to the sky and snapping a shot. They typed into the phone, the others looking over their shoulders to see what was happening. They were searching the Database, Hathor realised, recognising the quick-moving letters, numbers and results as the Database searched for all relevant information. Results were spat out and Mel selected one, skimming over it quickly before returning to the top.

"Dimensional Fracture," Mel read aloud from the article the Database had given her in response to the picture. "Throughout the history of Yenari, there have been cases of Dimensional Fracture, times when the Walls of the World become weak or broken, and cause interlaying dimensions to fall in on each other. This often happens on a small scale and has very little effect on the dimensions, including accidental transport of beings and some influence on the environment and architecture, causing them to mix together. When Dimensional Fracture takes place, it can be seen to the naked eye as bright white cracks in the fabric of reality."

Brayden looked to the sky. "Yep. That sounds about right."

"There are many species which can sense this change including Shifters, some Fae, Star-Weavers, Dreama, some Hybrid species, and the Ævum. In short, all beings who fall above the Hierarchy of Primordials can sense this change. This also applies to certain powerful Gods who don't quite make the Primordial ranking but are superior to the regular powers of the Gods."

"Wait, the Ævum?" Imogene braced herself on Hathor's shoulder to have a better look at Mel's screen. "I thought those guys were a myth."

Iridia looked confused. "The who?"

Hathor explained. "The Ævum are a race of supposedly ancient beings who are devout followers of Ixasis, Time. They claim to answer to Ixasis' master, though no one knows who that is, and are sworn to never interfere on the Lower Planes. However, to them, the Lower Planes mean anything below them, so pretty much everything in Creation including the God Worlds. They exist in a plane above us."

Sol crossed their arms. "I thought the God Worlds were as high as the Planes go."

"Think of it this way," Hathor said. "All worlds believe they are on the highest Plane because they have no way to access those above them. In the case of the God Worlds, people who are lower can sometimes access them so they know they aren't the highest Plane."

But—" Sky held up a finger— "We have to remember that no one has ever accessed a plane above the God Worlds. Because of that, we assume they are the highest Plane there is. The Ævum, according to their story in the Chronicles, come from a place above, but because there's no way to access it and they almost never come down to the Lower Planes, everyone pretty much blows them off as a myth."

"That actually makes a lot of sense," Iridia said thoughtfully. "How can you believe that something exists if there's no proof of it at all?"

Valria crossed her arms. "Oh, please, people have been doing that since long before any of us were born. It's called blind faith." She turned to the visitors. "How do you guys know all this?"

Hathor exchanged glances with her friends. "We all went to the Academy and were basically forced to study The Chronicles," she said with a shrug. "It kinda grows on you after the fourth or fifth lesson."

"And a lot of our parents read it to us as kids," Maddie added. "Very popular children's stories."

"I gotta get my hands on this thing," Valria murmured, taking out her phone to make a note.

Brayden rested his chin in his fingers thoughtfully. "So, assuming this Dimensional Fracture thing has something to do with these Void Beasts you've told us about, I've gotta ask. How do we beat them?"

"You can't," Troy said.

"You can if you overload them with matter, but no one has ever done that," Sky corrected.

'Like I said, you can't."

Mel pocketed their phone. "Next question: Has anyone ever returned from the Void."

Maddie looked to the sky. "If The Chronicles are to be believed, yes. There's this story about a woman called Amneris—"

"Your mum's in this book?" Valria asked Hathor.

She shook her head. "Different Amneris."

Maddie cleared her throat. "Anyway, Amneris apparently got into the Void by accident and managed to find a way back by finding a weak point in the Walls to crossover. She and her story in The Chronicles, as well as a few things written by Celestus Alim, talk about how the Void is totally nuts and almost impossible to survive. What they don't explain is exactly how to survive nor how to travel between the two without it being mostly an accident."

"In other words, there's no way to stop whatever is happening from happening," Brayden finished.

Mel sighed. "We don't even know what is happening, only that there was some massive shockwave all of Creation felt and that it might have something to do with the Walls and these Void Beasts."

Troy was still watching the sky. "Whatever's happening, it's making those cracks get bigger." He pointed at what used to be a small one which now stretched a few metres across the sky. "I don't want to find out what happens when the sky shatters."

"You really think that'll happen?" Imogene asked. "I mean, come on, you can't shatter the sky."

Isaiah, too, was watching the cracks grow larger. "Someone certainly believes they can and appears to be succeeding."

"We should stay here a while and keep an eye on things," Hathor decided. "We should also keep an eye out for reports of this happening in other places. I doubt we're the only ones seeing this."

Maddie nodded. "It would be a good idea to keep people from panicking for as long as possible."

"And let your mum know what's happening," Mel added. "I have the strangest feeling everyone is turning to her and your Aunt for answers."

Hathor shook her head with a sigh but pulled out her phone to do just that. "Yeah, she's gonna be taking that well."