Chapter 1

Archmagis Micah Credence rested, exhausted, waiting for the end. One way or another, the end was near, but his preparations were complete so he could rest.

Reflexively, he reshaped the stone beneath the gray fabric he was sitting on. “No reason not to be comfortable,” he murmured to himself as he leaned back against the obsidian wall behind him. His steel gray hair was close cut. Micah had quit trying to hide the damaged left side of his face, the remnant of a past battle, with longer hair. Vanity no longer mattered. His crystal blue eyes closed. The worn lines on his face were so deep they could have been old wounds themselves. He slowly relaxed, breathing deep of the loamy smell of the air in the tiny habitat.

Soon, he would enter the craft he created to deliver his last blow to the Enemy. Similar attacks have been tried in countless other planetary systems and failed. The difference this time was him. Micah would personally initiate the attack and guide it to its conclusion. Ancient historical and magical texts suggested that success was attainable, if the weapon was structured correctly, and was personally delivered to its target by a Mage. Potentially, he could even survive, which sounded like fantasy. His survival wasn’t a goal, or even desired.

Micah adjusted his stone seat again and relaxed against the obsidian ... his ship. Absently he reached out to stroke the obsidian.

The ship was a one-hundred-foot-thick ceramic and steel globe encasing all systems and the lone pilot command station. Anti-gravity drives powered by a black hole coupled with a miniature sun provided power, and propulsion that could approach the speed of light. Faster than light propulsion wasn’t necessary on this craft since it would never leave this system. Surviving the battle was not part of its design parameter. Survivability was only required until the moment of impact on the Enemy. In many ways, the ship itself was the payload for the attack. The gravity drive would move the ship fast enough to allow him to be nimble within the gravitational forces he was about to unleash. The only long-range weapon was not visible from the outside. It was a pseudo canon that fired a miniature black hole every ninety seconds. There was no actual cannon barrel. The black holes could be formed on any solid surface within eight light hours of the ship and could be launched in any direction from that surface at varying speeds up to multiples of the speed of light. Each fired black hole could shatter a planet or destabilize a star. The entire ceramic and steel structure was embedded in a two-hundred-foot-thick ball of tempered, strengthened and magically optimized obsidian.

The technical aspects of the ship were formidable, but they had to be to support the runic power it carried. Tiny, closely spaced runes covered every surface, internal and external. The face of every seam and interface was covered in runes. Continuous lines of runic symbols covered the ceramic portion of the craft and the interior of the obsidian shell. Where the materials met, the runic symbols on each material merged, creating a boundary extending beyond the five dimensions of length, width, depth, density, and time.

The ship was a testament to the merging of Magic and Technology perfected during the last breaths of the dying universe. The merging of Magic and Technology required adding density as an observable dimension, and quantified other dimensions that ancient string theory only hinted at.

There was no entrance or portal to the ship. The only way to enter or exit was by teleportation. The interior cockpit was formed to fit Micah’s body and part of the function of the interior runes were to mold the ceramic shell to his body. Other runic functions, when powered, would reinforce, stabilize and protect Micah’s internal organs from the expected gravitational forces. Sensors encasing his hands allowed him to activate the attack with a twitch, which would also initiate his escape plan, if escape was possible.

Milan sighed, opened his eyes, and raised them to the clear shield covering the habitat to see the sky one last time, and flinched.

He knew what he would see, but the reality of it affected him the same way every time he looked at it with intent. The sky was black. Not the black of a dark room or a moonless night. There were no stars! The faint reflected glow from the ten outer planets came from the last neutron star he was orbiting and only emphasized the darkness of the rest of the universe. He was shielded from the blasting emanations of the neutron star by the planet closest to the sun. His ship sat, prepared to launch, on the dark side of the planet.

“It is all gone,” he murmured aloud, if only to hear another voice. He would cry if he had tears left to shed. All was ashes. All life had been consumed ... from every sun, from every planet, whether it had circled a sun or not.

Now that all his preparations were complete, he had nothing to do but wait. Wait and remember. His wife, sons and daughters ... all gone. Family, friends, and even enemies ... all gone amid their battles against the Enemy. The memories were like a knife in the heart, twisting, and he fiercely embraced them anyway. They were all he had left, even more valuable than his life.

He bitterly chuckled to himself. “The last Mage at the end of time, resting for the last battle against the last enemy.”

“Against the only Enemy.” he corrected himself after a moment.

The Enemy had been spiritual in nature since the beginning of time but had been grasping for physical existence from the beginning. Mankind’s inclusion in the Universe’s sentient species community happened after the Enemy attained physical form. The knowledge that every battle between good and evil, throughout the history of the universe, had added to a virtual balance sheet, was staggering. Every battle, whether an army of millions or an individual, impacted on a universal balance between good and evil, and destruction was always easier than creation. It also explained why Micah had quit aging more than a century ago. He quit aging shortly after the balance was lost. A critical mass had been attained. Evil incarnate emerged from the spiritual realm into the physical realm. Then, the universe began dying.