One hundred and fifty million miles away, across the silent gulf of interplanetary space, the planet Earth looked up at the sky.
For six months, since the total opening of the deep-space rifts during the lunar siege, Earth had existed in a twilight of creeping despair. The upper stratosphere had been choked with a toxic, violet foul fog. Void spores and cold-matter heat wave siphoned from the dying sun. Across the great mega-cities of New Baiko, the Atlantic Citadel, and the Vance Wilderness Safe hall, the sun had appeared as a dim, diseased ember. He cast cold, sickly shadows that caused crops to wither and ancient rift beasts to howl in world-ending frenzy.
Then, at exactly 04:12 Universal Time, the sun flared.
It wasn’t a destructive sun-fire mass ejection, nor a magnetic burst that crippled comms networks. It was a wave of pure, living, golden light that raced across the interplanetary void at the speed of light.
When the wave struck Earth’s magnetosphere, the world-size shield didn’t buckle. It sang.
The auroras that ignited over the poles were not the jagged, eerie violet ribbons of the Void Hive, but vast, flowing curtains of brilliant gold, emerald, and warm red stone. The solar cleanse wave pierced the upper air. Then, the toxic violet foul fog that had hung over the globe was dissolved in seconds. The oily, heat-drawing clouds evaporated into sparkling golden mist. That left behind a sky of crystal-clear, breath-taking azure.
