The silence that followed Jett's departure was more terrifying than the chaos of the explosion. It was an absolute silence, a vacuum that sucked in all other sounds. Leo was completely alone, an insignificant speck of dust in a graveyard of cosmic ambitions. His scooter, his only companion and mode of transport, was smoking, its electric motor emitting a low, dying hum before falling silent forever. It was dead.
He looked at the distant tower, his destination. It seemed miles away, across a field of unstable debris and reality predators. The tower was a needle of junk against a sky of nothingness, a monument to madness and survival. He had no choice. The journey had to continue.
The trek on foot was a surreal nightmare. Gravity was inconsistent, a capricious force that played with him. One moment, it pulled him hard against the metal of a ship's hull, making each step a Herculean effort. The next, it threatened to release him into the void with a misstep, making him dangerously light. He jumped from one piece of wreckage to another, his courier suit protecting him from the worst of the scrapes and the biting cold of space.
He quickly learned the rules of this place. Silence was his best friend. Movement attracted attention. He saw another Reality Eater from a distance, a bus-sized anomaly of static, slowly consuming the hull of a freighter. The creature didn't eat the metal; it erased it from existence, the ship disappearing pixel by pixel with a hum of static that made Leo's teeth ache. He stood motionless behind an asteroid for nearly an hour, his heart hammering against his ribs, until the creature drifted away, indifferent.
After hours that felt like days, he reached the base of the floating island Jett had pointed out. The "tower" was not a constructed structure. It was a mountain of junk piled with a manic precision. Hulls of ships formed the walls, their different colors and alloys creating a mosaic of dead technology. Communication arrays, bent and broken, served as parapets. Cracked cockpit windows, some still showing ghostly glimpses of distant stars, were the windows. And at the top, a mess of antennas and sensors slowly rotated, scanning the void like the eyes of a paranoid lighthouse, searching for threats only its builder could see.
There was no obvious door. The base of the tower was a wall of fused metal and compacted debris, as if an immense force had crushed everything together to create an impenetrable foundation. Leo circled the structure, looking for an entrance. He found it on the most sheltered side of the island, facing the absolute void: a single airlock door, torn from a starship, with a pressure wheel in the center.
He tried to turn the wheel. It was stuck with rust and time. Next to the door, a small access terminal blinked with a single message, the green letters glowing in the darkness:
[WHAT DOES A COURIER BRING THAT HE NEVER DELIVERS, BUT ALWAYS KEEPS?]
It was a riddle. A test. The Hermit didn't want visitors; he wanted people who thought like him, who understood the nature of his work. Leo thought. A delivery? A package? No, that was what he delivered. It was deeper than that. What did he, as a courier, always bring with him, on every trip, through every portal? His bag. His scanner. His scooter. But he didn't keep those things. He used them. They were tools.
Then, the answer hit him, simple and obvious, a fundamental truth of his new trade. It wasn't an object. It was a concept. It was what bound him to the client, what forced him to cross hell for a marinated egg or a book.
He leaned into the terminal's microphone. "A promise," he said, his voice hoarse.
There was a moment of silence, then a loud click. The airlock wheel turned on its own, and the door hissed open, releasing a smell of ozone and overheated metal.
The interior of the tower was even more chaotic than the exterior. It was a labyrinth of narrow corridors, made from ship panels and hanging cables that swayed like vines. But the most impressive thing was the maps. They were everywhere. Holographic star charts hovered in the air, showing dead galaxies and unknown nebulae. Delivery route maps, drawn on pieces of metal with a welder, covered the walls. And complex diagrams of portal flows, with mathematical equations that made Leo's head ache just looking at them, were scrawled on every free surface.
In the center of the main room, his back to Leo, was a figure hunched over a huge light table covered in transparent maps. It was an old man, thin and frail, with a long white beard and wild hair that looked like it hadn't been cut in decades. He wore a patched-up pilot's suit and muttered to himself, tracing lines on the maps with a trembling finger.
"Wrong, wrong, all wrong," the Hermit mumbled. "The 7-gamma reality stream is drifting by 0.2 degrees. Don't they see? It's going to cause a cascading portal jam that will wipe out the entire Orion sector..."
"Excuse me," Leo said softly, afraid of startling the old man.
The Hermit froze. Slowly, painfully, like an old machine being reactivated, he turned. His eyes were the most surprising thing about him. They weren't the eyes of a madman. They were incredibly lucid, blue and bright, and they held a sadness and a knowledge that seemed as vast as the Void itself.
He looked at Leo, his gaze taking in his courier suit, his scanner, his exhaustion.
"A courier," the Hermit said, his voice raspy from disuse. "It's been a long time since I've seen one of your kind in these parts. What brings you to my observatory at the end of reality, little messenger? A lost delivery?"
"I'm looking for the Regulator," Leo said, getting straight to the point. "I need a map to get through the chronal storm."
The Hermit laughed, a dry, cracking sound that turned into a cough. "The Regulator. Of course, you are. The heart of the machine. The big secret. Why would a mouse want to visit the center of the mousetrap?"
"To destroy it," Leo said, the words coming out with more conviction than he felt.
The Hermit studied him for a long moment, his head tilting. "You have the spark. The spark of rebellion. I had it once, a long time ago." He sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of centuries. "I can draw you the map. But the price is high. Knowledge for knowledge. Tell me, messenger... what do you know about 'recycling'?"
Leo's blood ran cold. "I know what it is. I know what they do."
"No," the Hermit said, his blue eyes glowing with a frightening light. "You know the result. You don't know the purpose."
He held out a trembling hand, the sleeve of his pilot's suit riding up to reveal his wrist. There was no skin. There was polished metal and exposed circuitry, a cybernetic prosthetic seamlessly integrated into his arm.
"The Regulator isn't just the Syndicate's power core, kid," the Hermit said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "It's also their prison. And the souls they 'recycle'... they aren't for creating doormen and scavengers. That's just a byproduct, an efficient use of the leftovers."
He looked at his own mechanical hand with an ancient disgust.
"The souls are the fuel. We are the fuel that powers the machine."