**RIFTBLOOD: VOIDHUNTER**
Book 2 – Opening Sequence
The stars were wrong.
Rhea Voss noticed it the instant Kane's battered frigate, *Widow's Lament*, dropped out of fold-space above the dead world called Ashfall-9.
The constellations she'd navigated by since she was sixteen had been rearranged like furniture after a bar fight. Something had reached out and moved the furniture of the universe while no one was looking.
Kane's voice crackled over the intercom, calm in the way only liars and the already-dead can manage.
"Captain. You're gonna want to see this."
She was already moving, boots hammering the deck plates. The scar in her chest (where the black cube used to live) throbbed like a second heart trying to remember how to beat.
The viewport showed Ashfall-9 cracked open down the middle, a canyon glowing with violet light so bright it hurt to look at directly. And in that canyon, something moved. Not the Harrow. Something older. Bigger. A silhouette the size of a continent, all angles and hunger, wearing the planet like a coat.
Kane leaned in the doorway behind her, arms folded, cigarette dangling from his lip even though the air filters would murder him for it.
"Remember how you killed their mothership?" he said. "Turns out that was just the doorbell."
Rhea didn't answer. She was watching the thing in the canyon tilt its head (if a continent could have a head) and look straight at the ship. Straight at her.
A voice that wasn't a voice slid into her skull like a scalpel made of silence.
You rang, little breaker-of-cubes?
The scar split open. Black blood (not hers, never hers) poured down her ribs and hissed into vapor when it hit the deck.
Kane took one look at her, dropped the cigarette, and reached for the alarm.
Too late.
Every screen on the bridge lit up with the same three words, written in a language that predated light:
**THE DEEP IS COMING.**
Then the stars went out.
All of them.
At once.
The *Widow's Lament* tumbled end-over-end into sudden, absolute dark. Engines dead. Gravity gone. Only the emergency strips glowing blood-red.
Rhea floated in the middle of the bridge, black blood orbiting her like a halo of razor wire.
Kane's voice, small now: "Rhea… what the hell did you wake up?"
She smiled. It hurt.
"Something that's been waiting seventeen years to finish our conversation."
Somewhere in the dark outside the hull, something laughed with the sound of collapsing galaxies.The lights die.
Gravity dies.
Every alarm on the *Widow's Lament* screams once, then chokes on its own tongue.Rhea's scar r, still bleeding black, suddenly seals itself with a sound like a coffin lid slamming. The blood hanging in the air reverses direction and rockets back into her chest.
She hits the deck hard enough to crack ribs.
Kane's already moving, mag-boots locked, yanking open the weapons locker.The hull groans. Not from impact. From pressure. Something on the outside is squeezing the ship the way a child tests a tin can before crushing it.Emergency lights flicker back. They're the wrong color, violet, the exact shade of the canyon on A
Every shadow in the corridor stretches ten meters longer than it should.Kane shoves a pulse-carbine into Rhea's hands. "Whatever you woke up is inside the ship."The first crewman dies.
Petty Officer Lira, floating near engineering, gets pulled backward through a bulkhead that isn't there anymore. One second she's screaming. Next second there's only a wet red silhouette painted on the air, then nothing.Rhea and Kane sprint for the armory. The corridors keep changing. One turn and they're running uphill. Another and the floor is the ceiling. Reality is drunk.They reach the armory. Door's fused shut. Kane slaps a breaching charge. Rhea notices her reflection in the polished steel: her eyes are solid black, no whites, no pupils.
The reflection smiles when she doesn't.Charge blows. Inside: rows of rifles floating like dead fish.
And something else.
A single shard of the black cube, no bigger than a fingernail, embedded in the far wall. It's pulsing.
It whispers her childhood nickname in her mother's voice.
She rips it out with her bare hand. The shard burrows into her palm like it was always meant to be there.Power surges back. Gravity slams everyone to the floor. The ship lurches, engines howling like tortured animals. Someone, something, just took the helm.Over the ship-wide comm, a voice that is a thousand voices layered over grinding metal:
"Run, Riftblood. The Deep likes to chase."
The *Widow's Lament* becomes a maze designed by something that studied human fear for sport.
Corridors loop back on themselves.
Bulkheads open into starless void where crewmembers are unmade molecule by molecule.
Gravity flips every thirty seconds.
Temperature cycles from cryogenic to blast-furnace in heartbeats.
Rhea and Kane fight through it with a squad of five marines who are already cracking.
They lose two in the first five minutes: one swallowed by a floor that turns to teeth, the other aged to dust in three seconds when he looks directly at what's following them.They reach the primary spine corridor, a 300-meter straight shot to the bridge.
The lights die again.
When they come back, the corridor is gone.
Replaced by open space.
They're floating in vacuum, still inside the ship, staring at Ashfall-9's broken corpse a thousand kilometers below. The canyon is now an eye. It blinks.The Deep speaks again, intimate, right inside Rhea's skull.
"I tasted your fear when you were nine years old and hiding under the bed while your father drank himself quiet. I have waited patiently."Rhea screams, not in fear, in pure rage, and punches the shard in her palm.
Black veins explode up her arm. The void around them fractures like glass.
Reality snaps back. They're in the spine corridor again.
But now the walls are bleeding starlight.
Kane grabs her shoulder. "Bridge is two hundred meters. We get there, we overload the core, we blow this ship into the next dimension if we have to."
Rhea's voice is calm. Too calm.
"No. We don't run anymore."
She turns to face the darkness behind them.
"Come get me, you bastard."
The darkness smiles with too many mouths.
And charges.