All the action was far from here. Visible – the anomaly couldn’t be missed – but the board game and pieces were all obscured. Channel feeds however were a different matter, and these were properly arrayed and attended to by the researcher and her shipmate. She listened and investigated.

“Arcs move in.” Processes were smooth as all the ships attained the velocity to begin acquiring target locations.

At full charge, all set, mirrors setting. Five to a ship, each process individual and coordinated. Their signals were negotiating the anomalous environment.

Flight pairs began lattice switching, to alternately set and boost until every ship’s energy charge was placed entirely in connection. In immediate shift, they began altering torsions in a curved net pattern. Light flashed, a mirrortech side effect.

These patterns tightened and new iterations overlaid atop them. Each set of actions felt as though it were sinking in. The signal nature began to generate tensile gravity. The environment was responding.

A collective gear shift enacted the pull, streaming towards the ship boundary around the vortex. Shadow images amid arrows of light swarmed in quantity.

A dragon can hatch a hundred ways. This one, made of eight, ready to emerge into material was a shared perception – new since its first eight were set to exist in an ages-long otherside trap. They discovered a truth immediately timeless, and encouraged it to be. And in its theoretical existence lay key after key for those that nurtured it. Always an immeasurable process.

All you need to do is meddle with it significantly, if you want it to happen according to your symphony. The song is ready to play regardless.

In the quiet world just a gasp was heard in the ear. It was lightning eyes and shadow scales holding everyone in its gaze, its gaze its grasp. In its grasp there was no pull, only a feeling of envelopment. Its breath an inrushing expansion, all parts of it very close now.

And so, a crumbling entropy unfolded, even as something was becoming. And with immediate wisdom, it claimed. The pieces, the wreckage, in wholeness at this moment. To shield, to resist the onrushing for those within its motion was incomprehensible. It was a swift reintegration of life.

This battle was already tragic. Arcta’s face was held like a crying statue as she brought the vessel on its own course, her shipmates doubly unconscious next to each other behind.