It had been several weeks since Tuera had last set eyes on her father Venthrax... or, at least, the enormous mass of pan-dimensional planet destroying madness that her father had become. He was certainly a far cry from the fragile Dalaran mage that he used to be over a century ago, and very different than the demon lord who had abandoned the first Ashen Citadel nearly three decades previous.

She had been forced to run from him during their last encounter, but considering the scale of what she was up against, that was entirely expected. To make sure that this next encounter would play out different than before, Tuera and Sheason had been busy on a plan to even the odds.

Tuera had come across many beings in her travels that were stronger than Venthrax. He wasn't all powerful (at least, not yet...). But the problem was that all those beings that could match him – or were his better – were fickle and unreliable. They all seemed to think of themselves as Gods – assuming they were even consciously "aware" by mortal definitions at all.

And Tuera was an atheist. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Everything withers. Everything dies eventually – hell, she'd been to some universes where even death itself was able to die. As far as she's concerned, if something can die? It's not a god. Everything, including her father, has a weakness; the trick is finding it, and exploiting it...

"How much longer?" Tuera asked, staring out of the main viewport of Sheason's starship at the planet below. "I thought we would've been done by now."

"Have a little patience," Sheason grunted from the pilot seat, toggling a few switches on the console next to him. "You're the one who insisted these satellites had to orbit in a specific pattern to get the 'sigil' correct."

"Hmph," Tuera rolled her eyes. "You should let me fly. I can-"

"Not a chance," Sheason barked. "This is my ship."

"Out of the two of us, I can actually fly. You know that, right?" Tuera asked, turning to Sheason with a cocky smirk.

"Out of the two of us, who had the patience to actually get a pilots license?" Sheason shot back.

Tuera grumbled in annoyance, but didn't say anything. She didn't want to admit it out loud... but he was right, and she knew it. It was always annoying when he was right. Sheason flipped another switch on the console, and the ship shuddered as the last of the satellites was ejected from the underside cargo hatch.

"Are you really sure he's down there?" Sheason asked, leaning over the console to look out the viewport. "It doesn't look like it. The last time he was on a planet, we could see the effects from orbit. It was practically cracking from all the strain..."

"Oh, he's down there, alright," Tuera replied, turning to leave the bridge. "Make sure to keep the engines running, just in case this doesn't work."

"Will do," Sheason said, shooting her a lazy salute. As she passed, he slowly spun the pilot seat to face her. "But... you know we're never gonna get another shot at this if it doesn't work. You know that, right?"

Tuera paused for a long time at the door, her hand hovering just over the button.

"Keep the engines running all the same," she said, flashing him a smile. The doors slid open with a hiss, and Tuera started to leave once again.

"Good luck down there," Sheason said, just before the doors slid shut behind her.

Far, far below the orbiting starship was a vast pristine ocean of translucent blue; a glassy expanse of rolling waves, stretching out to the horizon in every direction. The only imperfection was a single tiny island of rock breaking the surface. The only sound, apart from the wind, was the breaking of waves against the shore.

A crack of thunder broke the stillness. Tuera appeared on the island amid a bolt of lightning. She looked rather different than she usually did as she stood in the swirling smoke of her entrance. She wasn't wearing some high-fashion, hopelessly impractical outfit of flowing robes, expensive jewelry, and absurdly high heels for one thing; today, she'd opted for something form-fitting and practical. She was even wearing flats. This was an outfit that would offer her as much freedom of movement as possible, which she would definitely need today.

Tuera started surveying her location. This untouched virgin island, made of many different types of igneous rock, was as far removed from anything as you could get on this planet. It was, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of nowhere. This was a perfect location to initiate Phase 1: no one would get in the way. There wasn't too much room to maneuver... but that wouldn't matter so much for this first part.

"Well..." Tuera muttered to herself, rolling her shoulders several times to loosen them up and cracking her neck from side-to-side. "Here goes nothing."

The wind shifted. The sky began to darken above her head, as storm clouds materialized out of nowhere; lightning flashed from within, and thunderclaps boomed. The ocean surrounding the island instantly became choppy and rough, with waves crashing against the rocks and sending sheets of salt water spraying into the sky. Tuera clenched her hands into fists, and the ground beneath her feet began to quake and rumble. Around her, stones of all sizes began to lift in the air, in complete defiance of gravity. As the air surrounding her began to heat up, the stones on the island began to glow, spark, and catch fire spontaneously. The many textures of volcanic rock that made up the surface of the island became so hot that everything started turning back into magma; giant columns of steam exploded into the sky as the super-hot liquid stone collided with the roiling, boiling ocean.

One by one, she dispelled the illusions that kept her power disguised. She deactivated the self-imposed magical restraints that prevented her from accidentally ripping holes in the fabric of reality with a mistimed cough; useful in a fight, but significantly less-so when she just wanted to walk around normally without breaking everything. As the invisible runes surrounding her shattered, the reserves of energy she could draw from grew exponentially, and her unshackled power affected every molecule of the environment around her.

She was doing this to get the attention of Venthrax. The energy she was unleashing was not just something that needed to be seen; right now, she shone like a lighthouse beacon, burning with an intense flame through every layer of reality and several parallel dimensions existing coterminously with the space she was occupying. With any luck, he would take the bait. Just like he did last time she did this, several weeks ago...

Only this time, she was facing him with a plan.

Something appeared at the edge of the horizon. The ocean parted, and the skies several miles distant began to smear, splitting open in a kaleidoscope of color. Tendrils of energy and flesh clawed their way through the parting ocean, tearing at the sky and pulling itself to the surface, holding onto nothing.

Tuera smiled to herself, as both her hands became wreathed in multicolored flame. Sure enough, her father took the bait, like a moth to a flame.

The massive wall of flesh, trailing shadowy echoes of iridescent eldritch flame behind him, charged through the ocean waves towards Tuera as if the water simply wasn't there. Titanic walls of water preceded him, and the tsunami hit the island with such force that it was practically obliterated. By the time the water had settled and Venthrax came to a stop, he was looming menacingly over what was left of the island... and there was Tuera, standing obstinately on the same patch of stone, surrounded by a crackling, smoking dome of energy, piles and piles of salt, and billowing clouds of superheated steam.

"SO..." Venthrax bellowed from far too many mouths and too many voices to go along with them; ghostly afterimages vibrated away from the monstrous behemoth with every syllable. "YOU'RE STILL ALIVE..."

"Of course I am," Tuera shot back, standing her ground – despite the ground itself beneath her feet trying as hard as it could to rip itself apart. "Survival is what I'm best at."

"WE SHALL TEST THAT SENTIMENT," he bellowed.

Tuera barely let him finish before unleashing a volley of energy straight at the amorphous mass that (she guessed, at least) was his face. Spears of fire and lightning cut through the air and exploded against the flesh, sending blood and gore everywhere... but not for long. As soon as the fel-flames dissipated, the exploded meat and offal still hanging in the air reversed direction, and the damage was repaired in seconds.

Venthrax let out a noise from his thousands of mouths that was almost entirely not unlike a sigh. The landscape all around Tuera started to stretch and squish as the fabric of reality was bent out of shape to accommodate his multi-dimensional bulk; almost before she knew it, it was as if reality itself – framed by a mass of meaty tentacles – was closing in and threatening to crush her.

There was a flash of light as the tentacles made contact with the barrier of energy all around her. Tuera held her hands out above her head, pouring energy into the spell to keep it active. Every part of her was shaking from the strain, and a trickle of blood started to leak out of her nose. The more she tried to resist, the more spider web-like cracks appeared in the transparent crackling energy shield.

Right before the barrier broke, she snapped her fingers, and a disk appeared below her feet. She fell through the portal, and emerged somewhere far above Venthrax, just as the host of fleshy tentacles collapsed inward and destroyed what was left of the island. Whips of orange energy coiled around her fingers, and she swung her arm around, sending them screaming at the pulsating mountain of organic madness.

It looked like she was trying to tie up his limbs in the energy whips, since all five of them made a beeline for the biggest of his tentacles... but it didn't seem to work. Venthrax barely moved, and the burning threads of energy were batted aside before shattering completely.

"THAT WON'T WO-" Venthrax began, just as Tuera let loose a concentrated blast of energy and magical fire. He seemed to be momentarily staggered... until everything on his body shifted, the air all around him seemed to fracture and reflect in on itself in a kaleidoscopic pattern, and a massive toothy maw appeared. The energy poured straight into his gullet, sucking it in and consuming the blast like a drain dealing with water.

WHAM!

Tuera was knocked out of the sky by one of the tentacles, and she was sent careening down into the violent seas all around them. She barely had time to register being completely submerged before the waves all around her parted. She was unceremoniously dumped face-first onto the newly exposed sea floor, as walls of water a hundred feet high surrounded her. By the time she got to her feet, Venthrax was filling her view, consuming everything around her with teeth, tentacles, and flesh; all the while, holes of unreality winked in and out of existence.

Tuera shook her head, trying to ignore the pain from her many wounds as her blood and salt water mixed together. As powerful as she was, he was orders of magnitude stronger than her and getting more so with every second; even as she stood there, he was consuming the landscape around them. She would only get weaker if the fight dragged on any further... What was taking so long?

"THIS IS POINTLESS," Venthrax bellowed. "I AM BEYOND YOU IN EVERY WAY." The mountain of madness was slowly advancing on Tuera, completely un-phased by the spells she was chucking his way. She was hitting him with everything from fireballs to corruption seeds to energy beams to Life Drain siphons and every possible spell in between that she could think of – flashy or otherwise. But nothing seemed to slow him down. "YOU ARE LITTLE MORE THAN A SAVAGE, THROWING ROCKS. YOU CANNOT THROW ONE BIG ENOUGH..."

Tuera halted in her offensive, and looked to the sky. She could barely see what she was looking for beyond the distortions in space and time... but a single glint was all she needed.

And that was when she knew she had him.

Tuera grinned broadly at Venthrax and snapped her fingers. A shadowy portal opened up behind her, and she fell backwards into it right before her illusions and power restraints reasserted themselves. The portal swallowed her up completely... and then collapsed in on itself, closing behind her and disappearing with a pop.

Venthrax paused, caught off guard by this new development. He was momentarily bewildered: he could no longer sense her power. Wherever she had gone, she was no longer on this planet – and that confused him.

But before he could be confused any further, a beam of bright pink light fell from the sky and impacted with Venthrax, completely enveloping his immense bulk – as well as everything else for several miles in every direction around him. Venthrax was bewildered: this energy was... different, somehow. He couldn't absorb it. It was wrong! Then, when he tried to shift his immense bulk out of the way, he became angry: whatever this was, it was physically anchoring him in place.

And then, when he could feel his projected extensions that existed in the other dimensions all around him start to fold in on themselves... he became concerned. He roared and bellowed and thrashed and tried everything he could think of to extricate himself from this spot, but it was no use. The harder he resisted, the more he was held in place. It was like he was a 4-dimensional hypercube, forced to collapse and exist in only three dimensions.

Sheason sat at the controls of his starship, calmly watching the lightshow envelop the planet below. According to the sensors, the bright pink anti-magic energy beams produced by the network of satellites were acting as a suitable dimensional anchor, focused squarely on Venthrax. He wasn't going anywhere.

"Well, credit where credit is due," he mused to himself. "She managed to distract him for juuuust long enough. He never even saw it coming."

Sheason grabbed the mug of coffee from the cup holder next to him, and turned his attention to the other side of the viewport. A relatively small moon, roughly half the diameter of the planet he was orbiting, was approaching at an incredible speed; it was going so fast, the movement of the moon was easily visible to the naked eye. The gravitational forces alone of an object that size trying to move that fast would normally have torn the space-rock apart. However, the mining tugs that had towed it out of orbit would keep it intact for just long enough to reach its destination: the networked web of energy produced by the satellites.

Sheason watched, calmly sipping from his coffee, as the moon passed through the energy field. Visual echoes began to appear all around the planet as the moon disappeared from reality, but continued on its course towards Venthrax; or, rather, the last remaining parts of Venthrax that existed everywhere except the material plane.

"I wonder if this rock is big enough..." Sheason mused aloud with a chuckle.

After a few minutes, the moon – or, more accurately, the shattered, fragmented remnants of what used to be the moon – reemerged into real space several million miles away from the far side of the planet. The hundreds of chunks of destroyed space-rock careened away and spun off harmlessly into the depths of space.

The spot on the surface where Venthrax had been moments before was completely still. There were no longer any distortions in reality visible from orbit. No signs of life of any kind. Just a large, bone-white stain that could be seen clearly from space...

The exact spot where Tuera has been standing moments earlier looked unrecognizable. There was no longer an ocean for miles in any direction... just a vast desert of calcified flesh and flash-burned salt. Great spires of charred bone, wrapped in ash and stone that had been meat just moments ago, jutted forth from the ground at all angles. Flakes of that same ash floated freely in the air, along with particles of anti-magic energy; the tiny orbs of light drifted away from the ground and up to the sky, like reverse snowflakes.

A sonic boom broke the stillness, and half a second later the desert was disrupted by a colossal explosion. At the center of the expanding cloud of ash and smoke was a vaguely cylindrical metal box: a drop pod that had just fallen from orbit. A series of explosive bolts fired alongside the edges on the front, and the hatch was blown open. As the smoke and dust finally started to clear, Tuera emerged from within.

She was still wearing the form-fitting bodysuit as before; however, she was also carrying dozens of weapons, all strewn about her person. Pieces of light-weight, ultra-dense, high tech armor plating (that she had "borrowed" from the armory on Sheason's starship) were attached at key points on her outfit, to give her an added layer of protection as well as acting as relay boosters for her personal energy shield.

She snapped her fingers, and all that appeared were a few sparks and a tiny green flame that quickly petered out. The location was still saturated in anti-magic, but it wasn't a total blackout anymore. She had to do this quick, and make sure he was dead before the anti-magic disappeared completely.

"Guess these weapons were a good call..." Tuera mused aloud to herself as she walked away from the drop pod. "Time for Phase Two."

At the far end of this vitrified basin of former flesh and bone, cracks began to appear. A boulder-sized hole flaked away – followed swiftly by a boulder-sized fist, punching through. Tuera came to a halt and watched with a wry smirk as Venthrax pulled himself free from the ashen carcass of his former body.

To call him "human," even now, would be a bit of a stretch. His body was vaguely humanoid in shape, but the proportions of his limbs were all wrong; warped and twisted into grotesque parodies of their former selves. His skin was mottled and discolored, covered in an inhuman slime from so many years serving as the heart of the beast. His armor – the same set he had been wearing when he conducted the ritual decades earlier – had long ago fused to him, and his body seemed to resemble a mixture of bone, scales, and steel melted together into a hideous mockery of what he used to be.

"You..." Venthrax coughed out roughly as he finally emerged, his voice thick with phlegm and hoarse from decades of screaming. "You've... ruined... everything!" It sounded like he was having terrible difficulty with the simple act of speaking.

"Yep," Tuera snapped back, nonchalantly walking toward her father. "But that's why you left so long ago, isn't it? Because my very existence ruined everything for you, didn't I?"

She shook her hands to either side of her. A shield materialized from a metal pod on her right arm; a sword unfolded itself alongside her left arm, neatly depositing itself in her palm. As soon as the last pieces of nanotech snapped into place, both the sword and shield became surrounded by a crackling power field of scintillating energy, threatening to set the air alight.

"You... were to be... my greatest creation..." Venthrax growled out, plunging a misshapen claw of a hand into the ash at his feet. "The... harbinger... of my... apocalypse..." With a single motion, he pulled out a massive sword of melted flesh and twisted steel from the ground. It was nearly as long as he was tall, and he towered over Tuera.

Tuera stood her ground and lifted the shield above her head; Venthrax swung his sword, and brought it crashing down upon her. Arcs of lightning burst from the impact, showering everything and everyone in the area with an explosion of sparks. The ground beneath her feet cracked... but Tuera herself did not buckle.

"I would have been no such thing!" she bellowed, shifting her weight to deflect the sword away from her with the shield and diving for the gap between his legs. "I would've been a slave! You would have made me a puppet to your will, and NOTHING MORE!" She rolled, slashing at his legs while she yelled, and landing on her feet some distance behind him.

Venthrax snorted, staring at her over his shoulder with eyes that burned from within.

"So... shortsighted..." Venthrax grunted, using all his strength to shift his massive bulk around to face her. "...you lack... vision..." His back cracked and popped as he finally twisted around most of the way, and brought his sword around in another wide arc; a trail of anti-magic and ash was displaced as it cut through the air. The sword slammed into the ground, sending a billowing cloud of ash and dust everywhere.

Tuera had already moved out of the way, and Venthrax wasn't fast enough to catch her.

"Did you really expect me to submit?!" Tuera bellowed, spinning the sword around in her palm. She thrust it forward, directly into the back of his knee; Venthrax howled in pain as the electrified blade cleaved straight through his leg. The ground shook as he fell, with his leg no longer able to support his immense bulk.

"I will never be a slave!" she continued, leaving the sword embedded in his leg as she clambering up his scaly back toward his head. She flicked out her hand, and another nanotech sword appeared. "Do you hear me?!" As she yelled, she started feverishly hacking away at his neck with the sword on one side, and the edge of the shield on the other; sparks flew as the weapons met unexpected resistance from the armor, scales, and bone. "NEVER!"

Tuera had finally managed to chip away at the armor, exposing a small gap. She was just about to plunge her sword into his bleeding flesh when suddenly:

"ENOUGH!"

A massive fist grabbed her by her entire torso, and Venthrax threw her aside. Tuera tumbled through the air like a ragdoll and crashed into one of the pillars of calcified flesh. It exploded in a billowing cloud of bone-white dust.

"You prattle on... ignorant of your true purpose!" Venthrax growled, getting back on his feet. The sword in his leg snapped in half, as his re-growing flesh forced it out. As he started slowly making his way to her, Tuera pulled herself free of the rubble. "You claim you are free... but you are blind to the TRUTH!"

Tuera shook her vision clear as she got to her feet. Even dazed as she was, she could tell that his speech was becoming less stilted with every moment. The anti-magic field was still in play, but it was getting weaker. It was only a matter of time before he regained his strength. She either needed to be quick on the draw when she was strong enough, or keep him off his feet so he didn't realize what was happening.

"I am the master of my own destiny..." Tuera said, tossing aside the shield, and reaching behind her for a pair of grenades. "Not you... not ANYONE!" She primed the grenades and threw them straight for his face before running out of sight. Venthrax was momentarily consumed by a pair of plasma fireballs, but strode through it, seemingly unfazed.

And yet... even as the biggest fires snuffed themselves out, several embers continued to flicker and burn within the cracks of his armor...

"Are you so certain of that?" he snarled, looking around and trying to find her. "Is that why you follow the orders of your old nemesis?"

Tuera froze behind one of the pillars, midway through activating a pair of plasma guns. The words cut her deeply; probably a lot deeper than she wanted to admit. But she had to force those thoughts out of her mind... for now. She couldn't let herself get distracted. Not now. Not with victory so close. So, she grit her teeth, gripped the guns even more tightly, and threw her voice in several directions:

"I don't follow his orders..." she said emphatically. "...any more than he follows mine." Venthrax turned his attention to one of the echoed voices, and she quickly scurried to another pillar directly behind him. "You're just the bigger threat..."

Venthrax started laughing grimly as he swung his sword in a wide arc, splintering one of the pillars. When the sword finally hit the ground, everything shook; several of the other pillars collapsed from the shockwaves.

"Is that why you are down here, instead of him? Is that why you do all his heavy lifting?" Venthrax boomed between chuckles, dragging the tip of his sword through the powdered bone and ash. "You can lie to yourself all you want... but you cannot lie to me..."

"I've no need to lie," Tuera said, appearing directly behind him, with both plasma guns aimed at his head. "Only the need to kill you."

Venthrax tried turning to the sound, but – once again – he was too slow. A torrent of superheated plasma pummeled him; the still burning embers in his armor exploded outward, widening the cracks in his armored hide and exposing the cracked and bleeding flesh beneath. He howled and snarled and thrashed under the withering fire. Large chunks of his armor exploded completely. The now-exposed flesh swiftly caught alight and was burned away.

Tuera emptied the guns and tossed them aside, advancing on Venthrax. He stood there amid a cloud of steam, smoke, and flickering flames. His whole body was shaking, and it was clear he was desperately trying to move... but several critical parts of his body were simply missing. Even his sword was broken, having shattered and melted in places.

As she got closer, she could feel the power return to her limbs. She waggled her fingers, and flames began to flicker around her hands: enough of the anti-magic had evaporated.

Venthrax stared at her with undisguised malice from his one remaining eye; the right side of his head was completely missing, and parts of it were still on fire. He burbled out one last thing, amid a torrent of black blood, leaking from his mouth and the holes in his neck.

"You will... always... be a slave... to something..."

Tuera surrounded herself with an intensely burning flame of magic fire and launched herself at Venthrax like a missile.

Sheason watched from the bridge of his starship as a bright flash engulfed the surface of the planet. There was a shockwave, followed by a single enormous beam of energy shooting out from the center. The wide streak of green light went on for miles, and left an immense gash in the clouds – and the landscape – as it passed.

As soon as the light on the surface died down, a nearby monitor flashed an alert at him; Sheason flicked a series of switches on a nearby console, and deactivated the "backup plan" Tuera had wanted him to use, on the off-chance she failed. The trio of orbital bombardment guns on the underside of his starship retracted back into their mountings and began to cool.

"Well, what do you know," he chuckled. "She actually pulled it off."

He finished the last of his coffee and smiled to himself.

Everything was on fire.

Tuera stood among the flames, trying to catch her breath. Her armor, equipment, and weapons – all of it except the bodysuit now completely broken – began to fall off her, piece by piece, clattering to the blackened and scorched earth at her feet. Her hands shook, and she sighed, drinking in the energy all around her.

Was it over?

Was he finally dead?

Slowly, carefully, she turned around, almost afraid to see the results. The glowing embers and blackened ground crunched loudly under her feet.

All that was left of Venthrax was a charred and malformed husk. Very little of him was recognizable; she had, quite literally, gone through him, and there was a gaping hole where his chest used to be. Not to mention, his twisted and mutated corpse looked like it was made entirely out of charcoal, sticking out of a crater that also resembled burnt charcoal.

She aimed an open hand in his direction as she approached, and then swiftly closed it into a fist. The charcoal-corpse shuddered violently, and crumbled into dust. She snapped her fingers, and suddenly a bright light appeared and began to twinkle in midair, where his head used to be.

The light became more distinct as she got closer: it appeared to be a small sliver of ethereal glass, spinning on its axis, and surrounded by wisps of flame and curling smoke. She held open her hand, and the sliver floated through the air, coming to rest directly above her palm. The flame burned cold as ice; a stark contrast to the blistering heat of the flames still burning in the crater around her.

This was all that was left of him: his soul, spirit, essence, consciousness, whatever you wanted to call it... this was it. All she had to do was destroy it.

And yet... she hesitated. Her hand trembled, suddenly unable to go through with it.

"You will always be a slave to something."

Venthrax's last words gnawed away at her insides. She had quiet reservations about this "alliance" with Sheason from the start. Not to mention... she had been the one doing all the work. During every encounter in their hunt, Sheason had been safely out of sight, sitting in his starship. Had he been using her, this whole time? Had she been made a slave to his whims, without even realizing what was going on?

And then there was the other worry: was he keeping her close, merely waiting for his chance to strike? That was certainly plausible. For a spy, he hadn't exactly been subtle about his mistrust of her...

He was on his way now, wasn't he? That's what was running through her mind as her paranoia kicked into high-gear. That must be why he still had those Demon blades: the same ones that he'd used to cut off her head at the Dark Portal, all those years ago. She'd stumbled upon them when she ransacked the armory, and he must have thought they were still hidden... Now that their common enemy was destroyed, he was going to come down here to try and kill her, wasn't he? Wasn't he?

But... there was a way to fight him, wasn't there? And it was right there, floating in the palm of her hand. All she had to do was consume the power in front of her, rather than destroy it. Yes... yes, that was the only way, wasn't it? She had to become stronger... and she had to kill him, before he killed her.

It was... it was the only way...

Wasn't it?

"No."

The moment passed.

She pulled her hand away from the flame briefly... and then shoved it away from her with a concussive blast of force. It flew through the air and exploded, cracking into a billion, billion shards of multicolored prismatic fire. There was a loud, ear-piercing shriek of anger and terror – the last gasp of Venthrax – as a shockwave blast of air was blown out in every direction. Moments later, that same air came rushing back into the epicenter. A bright flash illuminated the area, and there was one final pop as the last pieces of his essence imploded...

And then he was gone.

"No. I am no slave... and I will not be a slave to power any longer," Tuera said quietly to herself. "You've lost for the last time, old man. I'm in control of my own destiny..."

She snapped her fingers, and a shadowy portal appeared in front of her. Slowly, she walked into the shimmering gateway, and let out a sigh of relief as she crossed the event horizon.

"Let's find out what it holds."

She disappeared through the gateway, and it snapped shut behind her.

All that was left was silence.