Eva's confession, her quiet admission of the scars she carried, had settled between us, deepening the unspoken bond we shared.
It made this strange, intuition-led journey feel less like a captain indulging her talking dog's fancy and more like two wounded souls searching for answers in a galaxy that preferred to keep its secrets buried deep.
My "navigator-by-ancient-sorrow" routine continued, the pull towards that specific, quiet sector of Orion growing stronger, more insistent.
"We're close, Eva," I murmured, hours – or maybe days, time was a blur – later. The oppressive background hiss of the broader Felid presence had faded almost entirely here, and that specific, resonant ache of ancient sadness was no longer a faint hum but a palpable thrum in my bones, in the very air of the Wanderlust. "Whatever that symbol was pointing to… it's… it's right ahead."
On the main viewscreen, the starscape hadn't changed dramatically. No ominous planet, no giant space station. Just… a patch of space that felt older, quieter, and profoundly empty, yet paradoxically, full of… something.
An immense, silent waiting.
Eva had the Wanderlust creeping forward at a snail's pace, sensors on maximum, every system running at its quietest. "I'm not picking up anything, Bolt," she whispered, her brow furrowed in concentration. "No structures, no energy readings, no ships… just void. Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," I said, a shiver running down my spine despite the ship's steady temperature. The sorrowful resonance was becoming overwhelming, a crushing weight of millennia. "It's not a 'thing' we're approaching, Eva. It's a… a wound. A scar in the fabric of space-time itself, maybe. The place where that ancient question I felt earlier… the one that broke galaxies… was first asked."
And as we drifted into the heart of that invisible wound, it happened.
The sorrow, the question, the resonance of that ancient symbol I'd been tracking – it didn't just get stronger. It erupted.
It was like a dam inside my ancestral library bursting. Not just memories, but raw, unfiltered emotion, sights, sounds, smells from a time so distant it had no name, flooded my senses.
A cacophony of howls and hisses, not of battle, but of… shared creation? Then betrayal. An unimaginable, tearing agony. The scent of ozone and something metallic, like burning stars. Images flashed behind my eyes too fast to comprehend – colossal, glowing figures, the Progenitors, their forms indistinct but their power terrifying. The first Canids, noble and proud.
The first Felids, sleek and enigmatic. And then… a catastrophic sundering. A wave of pure, amplified despair washed through me, so potent it felt like my own heart was breaking a million times over.
"Bolt?!" Eva's voice was a distant pinpoint of sound in the roaring chaos engulfing my mind.
I couldn't answer. My legs buckled. The bridge of the Wanderlust dissolved into a swirling vortex of ancient light and shadow. The sorrow was a physical weight, crushing the air from my lungs.
The unanswered question was a psychic scream threatening to tear my consciousness apart.
What happened? Why? Who…
The last thing I saw before everything went black was Eva's terrified face swimming above me.
Eva's perspective (briefly):
Panic seized her. Bolt was down, convulsing slightly, a low whine escaping his throat, his eyes rolled back. "Bolt! Bolt, snap out of it!" She fumbled for the med-scanner, her heart hammering against her ribs. This was no ordinary seizure. This was what she'd feared – him getting lost in those ancient, terrifying memories.
And then, as if his mental agony had been a dinner bell, every alarm on the Wanderlust shrieked into life simultaneously.
Proximity alerts! Multiple contacts! Energy signatures – off the charts!
Her head snapped up to the viewscreen. Out of the seemingly empty void, ships were materializing. Dozens of them. Sleek, predatory Felid destroyers with their familiar, menacing profiles. But alongside them, impossibly, were other vessels – powerful, angular ships she'd never seen before but which Bolt's descriptions of Canid aesthetics matched perfectly.
They weren't firing at each other.
They were… converging. On her. On Bolt.
Before she could even think to power weapons or attempt an escape, her comm crackled. Not with a demand for surrender, but with a calm, impossibly ancient-sounding voice that spoke in perfect, unaccented Galactic Common, a voice that seemed to resonate with both the growl of a Canid and the purr of a Felid.
"Captain Eva Rostova. Bolt of the Canid memory-line. Your arrival has been anticipated. Do not resist. You will be escorted to the Sanctuary. The Arbiters await."
Her blood ran cold. Arbiters? Sanctuary? This was so much bigger than she could have ever imagined. Powerful tractor beams, one from a Felid ship, one from a Canid, locked onto the Wanderlust with gentle, inescapable precision.
Back to Bolt (as he drifts back to a hazy consciousness):
Darkness. Then, a slow return to a fractured awareness. My head throbbed with the phantom echoes of that cataclysmic memory burst. I was lying on something soft, not the deck of the Wanderlust. Strange scents filled my nostrils – ancient stone, exotic incense, and… ozone again, but fainter now, calmer.
And the quiet. A profound, heavy silence that felt older than mountains.
I managed to pry my eyes open. I wasn't on the ship. Above me arched a colossal, vaulted ceiling, carved from some kind of luminous, pale stone. Intricate carvings, depicting creatures that were both canine and feline, yet neither, danced across the walls in the soft, ethereal light.
Eva was kneeling beside me, her hand resting on my fur, her face etched with worry but also a kind of awed disbelief as she took in our surroundings.
We were in some kind of vast chamber, a temple perhaps, or a… sanctuary, as that impossible voice had said.
And we were not alone...
Standing silently in the shadows at the periphery of the chamber were figures. Tall, robed, some with the distinct, proud bearing I associated with the ancestral Canid echoes, others with the lithe, watchful grace of the Felids. They weren't attacking each other.
They weren't attacking us. They were just… waiting. Observing.
The ancient sorrow was still here, a dull ache in my soul, but the screaming question was quieter now, replaced by a vast, expectant silence.
The convergence was complete. Now, we just had to wait and see what the Arbiters, whoever or whatever they were, intended.