There were no long farewells. Urgency was a physical force, pushing them out of the Seraphina Drift sanctuary.
Elara's final words to Bolt as he boarded the newly repaired Nyxwing were not of hope, but of stark warning.
"Valerius does not seek to understand the song; he seeks to command the choir," she had said, her opalescent eyes grave.
"He sees the Ahna'sara not as a state of being, but as a tool of ultimate control. He will view you as a rival wielder, Bolt, not as a kindred spirit. Be wary of the paths he seems to leave open."
Now, hurtling through the silent, non-linear river of a songline, that warning echoed in Bolt's mind.
The Nyxwing, its hull shimmering and whole again, felt alive under his and Eva's combined guidance.
Eva, her expression a mask of focused intensity, piloted with a fierce precision, her hands moving over the luminescent controls.
Bolt sat beside her, the Focusing Sphere held gently in his clawed hands, his mind stretched out across the void, a silent scout on an ethereal ocean.
"He's trying to make a weapon out of empathy," Bolt rumbled, the thought taking shape as he spoke.
He looked at Eva, his transformed blue eyes holding a new, somber clarity.
"All of them. Krell wanted to use the Heart's power to conquer bodies. Valerius wants to use this… 'Primal Mandate'… to conquer souls. They hear the first note of the Ahna'sara's power and immediately think of how to aim it."
"And you?" Eva asked, not taking her eyes off the swirling vortex of light that was their path.
"I think… I'm just trying to hear the whole song," Bolt admitted. "The part they're all ignoring."
The journey was tense.
The songline to the Ghost Nebula was less stable than the one that had led them to Aethelgard, and they had to navigate around turbulent eddies of chaotic energy.
Twice, they felt the distant, psychic screams of ships that had blundered into the path and been torn apart, grim reminders of the dangers of this hidden form of travel.
Finally, they emerged.
The sight before them was both beautiful and deeply unsettling.
The Ghost Nebula was aptly named. It was a vast, swirling expanse of pale, ethereal gases – ghostly whites, soft blues, and phantom greens – that seemed to absorb and diffuse starlight rather than reflect it.
It played havoc with the Nyxwing's conventional sensors, the readouts immediately dissolving into a chaotic storm of static.
"Well," Eva muttered, her hands tightening on the controls.
"We're blind. All yours, Bolt."
"He's been here," Bolt said immediately, the Focusing Sphere growing warm.
He could feel the psychic wake left by the Star-Seeker fleet, a trail of cold, disciplined order carved through the nebula's natural chaos.
It was like finding the track of a predator in new-fallen snow.
"They moved through recently. Their resonance is still sharp."
"Can you follow it?"
"I can," Bolt affirmed. "But Elara's warning… I feel like he wants us to follow it."
"Do we have a choice?" Eva asked grimly.
"The entrance to the deeper songline, the one that leads into the Unsung Regions, is somewhere in the heart of this nebula. We follow Valerius's trail, or we're lost in here for cycles."
It wasn't a choice at all. Bolt nodded, closing his eyes and extending his senses, carefully tracing the cold, precise trail left by the Star-Seekers.
The Nyxwing glided into the ghostly veils of the nebula, its dark hull vanishing into the pale mists.
They moved for hours through a labyrinth of silent, beautiful desolation. The nebula was a graveyard of gravitational anomalies and pockets of strange radiation.
They passed celestial bodies that looked like crystalline bones and flew through clouds of shimmering dust that sang with a strange, sorrowful energy.
Deeper and deeper they went, following the psychic breadcrumbs left by Valerius. The trail was almost too easy, too clear.
"Something's wrong," Bolt said suddenly, his fur bristling. The Focusing Sphere in his hands flared with a sharp, warning light.
"The path ahead… his resonance, it's… it's a loop. An illusion. He's masking a gravitic sink!"
As he spoke, the very space before them seemed to distort.
A subtle but powerful gravitational pull began to tug at the Nyxwing, drawing them towards a patch of seemingly empty space that Bolt's empathic senses now recognized as a trap.
Eva swore, fighting the controls. "I can't pull away! The gravity well is stronger than the engine!"
And at that precise moment of vulnerability, the ghostly mists before them solidified.
Six sleek, dark vessels, their hulls shaped like predatory birds with cruel, angular lines, decloaked with chilling synchronicity, their forms appearing from nowhere.
Star-Seeker scout ships. They moved to block any potential escape route, their weapon ports glowing with a faint, malevolent light.
They hadn't just been following Valerius's wake. They had been walking straight into his snare.