The destructive power we now employed annihilated solar systems in their entirety. Civilizations that had barely raised their heads to look at the stars were obliterated. Advanced worlds, arrogant with their space travel abilities watched, helpless, stunned, and were annihilated.
Still Crayak and I grew stronger and more deadly, but if anything, it was I who grew most dangerous now.
There were two lines on a cosmic graph: One was the number of living planets, down and down. Life was failing around the galaxy as the two mad giants rolled here and there and crushed the helpless beneath them.
The other graph line, though, showed my own slow ascension over Crayak.
It was a hideous race to see which would happen sooner: my triumph over Crayak or our mutual destruction of all life in the galaxy.
And then, sheer accident took Crayak and me down a path neither of us had known existed.
Crayak laid a trap for me. He was desperate. Ready to gamble anything. So he began to move with a definable pattern. He deliberately laid the groundwork for me to guess his next move.
It worked. I read his pattern and foolishly ascribed it to exhaustion on his part. Thus it was that I emerged from Zero-space within a few hundred thousand miles of a force that neither I nor Crayak could hope to defeat: a black hole.
I now consisted of four thousand two hundred and twenty portions. I emerged from Zero-space trailing my vast, extended body behind me. The instant I emerged I saw the trap.
Too late!
The pull of the black hole was impossible to fight. I had great power. I did not have this power. My most forward portions fell into that gravity well with no chance at all of escape.
Crayak had laid the trap to perfection.
I shot an order to my other portions: Do not emerge!
Milliseconds from final disaster the remaining parts of me cancelled their descent from Z-space. I was wounded, not killed. But oh, how I was wounded.
I watched helplessly as vast parts of me, including the remnants of the original ship/body, all that was left of the true Ketran me, fell toward that black hole.
I was everywhere at once, lost, turned, twisted. In Z-space, in real space far away as parts of me emerged randomly, and falling into the horrible crushing mouth of the black hole.
I was bits and pieces.
The pain! My connections were across so many levels. It was not just a data stream, it was more than that. Those were my arms and wings there, falling, diminishing, being crushed by gravity.
Those were my eyes and ears spread out through space and nonspace. Stretched.
I felt the connection break down, felt it as if parts of my body were being sawed off. Pain! My mind was closing in, collapsing, no! Fragments. Pieces of me. Distorted cries and shouts of wild disjointed communication.
The universe itself seemed to disintegrate. The stars fell apart, opened themselves up like blossoming flowers. And then … and then …
I seemed to float in a place like nothing I had seen or imagined. All around me I saw massive, twisted lines of pure power, snapping and color-shifting. I saw numbers, deluges of them, I could hear them roaring around my ears. I reached out a vast hand and could run it over the curves of space itself. I could stroke the very curves of space-time.
I saw … I saw everything, the inside, underside, inner, and outer of everything at once.
I lived still.
But where was I?
What was I?
I was within a black hole, within Zero-space, within real space and yet unified into one whole through a medium I could not yet conceive.
I was seeing, hearing, feeling in all places at once. The effect was extreme disorientation.
I tried instinctively to pull my parts together, but I could not. It was impossible that I should still be alive, impossible that I could flap wings that were still in Zero-space, impossible that I should seem to wiggle pods inside a black hole.
I was aware of Crayak, I felt him approach my real-space portions. He was attacking me piece-meal, exploding parts of me with great glee.
I felt physical parts of me evaporate, burned away by energy beams. And yet my mind was not diminished.
Portions of me were now fully within the black hole, they were crushed to dots, crushed to the size of atoms, destroyed for all intents and purposes.
And yet I lived.
Something was happening. Something …
One by one Crayak annihilated the component parts of me. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And when nothing was left of me in real space he chased me into Zero-space and squeezed those helpless, inanimate bits of machinery and flesh and crystal out into real space where they could be destroyed.
And still I lived.
How much time had passed? Unknowable. I was no longer within time. I could see time as a series of interwoven strands, a trillion trillion strands of possibility.
Was I dead? Was I in some sort of afterlife?
Dead, no. The dead do not see, and I saw! I saw things no living creature had ever seen before. I was deep within the structure of the universe, I was within the code of creation.
There was nothing left of me, nothing that anyone could see or touch. I was gone, and yet I lived.
I don’t know how long I floated through this eerie, brilliant, wondrous landscape of pure energy and purest beauty. Time was for other creatures. Time’s arrow did not carry me along with it.
I knew nothing of this. I was a mere creature, for all my multitudes, for all my powers, I was, after all, a mere mortal creature.
It was as if one of the primitive Andalites I’d
