The moment his hand touched the dissipating form of the Star-Vampire, the world dissolved into a maelstrom of alien sensation. This was not like the cold, logical data of the Architect or the primal, simple hunger of the Deep Ones.
This was a storm in his soul, a violent, chaotic flood of pure, undiluted abyssal energy.
He was drowning in a sea of non-Euclidean geometry and impossible colors. He felt the cold, crushing pressure of the void between stars, the patient, silent hunger of a being that had hunted for eons in the dark. He experienced a thousand lifetimes of shapeshifting, of flowing like liquid shadow, of becoming the stone and the blade. The creature's consciousness was a razor-sharp shard of predatory intellect, so alien and so potent that it threatened to slice his own identity to ribbons.
