The concept of panic was supposed to be fundamentally impossible for the Void Broodmother Nihil-Kraken.
For ten billion years, fear had been an emotion experienced only by the prey. It was the wild shaking of mortal flesh as it was crushed under black glass back shells. It was the desperate weeping of sky gods as their temples dissolved into gray dust. It was the final, painful static of dying star systems being scrubbed from reality. The Broodmother was the cold, unfeeling void itself. The certain breakdown that waited at the end of time.
Yet now, anchored by ten thousand glowing sapphire cords and sliding inexorably toward a smiling blue blob, the ancient cosmic first-born began to scream.
“RELEASE US!”
The telepathic signal was no longer a majestic, reality-cracking decree of universal doom. It was a ragged, shrill shriek of raw, plain terror. The psychic hum echoed off the world-size ionosphere, bounced across the face of the twin moons. Then it echoed through every spiritual mind across two realms.
“WHAT ARE YOU?! WHAT MANNER OF DEMON ARE YOU?!”
The kraken thrashed with world-ending desperation. Its multi-hundred-mile tentacles clawed at the empty pocket of space. It tore jagged gouges through the local space-time fabric in a wild search for leverage. It fired its reverse entropic thrusters at total maximum overload, expelling billions of tons of white-hot dark matter and negative gravity pulses. The void behind the beast boiled into violent, swirling storms of black lightning that scorched the outer empty pocket.
