The moment the spacecraft slipped entirely out of hyperspace into the darkness, both Quasi-Myths could only see before them an expanse of the Star Ocean that felt fundamentally wrong as it stretched far and wide without any trace of light.
The usual rivers of starlight were absent. No nebulae glimmered. No astral tides flowed. Even distant stellar echoes, those faint pulses that seasoned existences used to orient themselves, were absent.
What remained was a vast, silent stellar graveyard, with dead stars hanging like blackened corpses, their remnants frozen mid-collapse. Shattered stellar cores drifted without radiation, and space itself appeared thicker, as if light had once tried to exist here yet failed.
The runic-scaled man stepped forward, his gaze piercing the darkness.
