'Damn right, laddy. One of the few things that keeps me all cheered up out here all by my wee lonesome. Och… here we go. Lionwalker tipped his head back, and stared out across the dome where the low layer of hazy light faded away. Overhead, the crystal was completely transparent, revealing the vast antagonistic nebulas that washed across the sky. Hundreds of stars shone through the glowing veil, spikes of light so intense they burned towards violet and into indigo. They multiplied towards the horizon as the planet spun slowly to face the Wall, that vast barrier of massive stars which formed the outermost skin of the galactic core.

'We can't see the Void from here, can we? Inigo asked. He knew it was a stupid question. The Void was obscured on the other side of the Wall, right at the very heart of the galaxy. Centuries ago, before anyone had even ventured out of Earth's solar system, human astronomers had thought it was a massive black hole, they'd even detected X-ray emissions from the vast loop of superheated particles spinning round the event horizon, which helped confirm their theories. It wasn't until Wilson Kime captained the Commonwealth Navy' ship Endeavour in the first successful human circumnavigation of the galaxy in 2560 that the truth was discovered. There was indeed an impenetrable event horizon at the core, but it didn't surround anything as natural and mundane as a superdense mass of dead stars. The Void was an artificial boundary guarding a legacy billions of years old. The Raiel claimed there was an entire universe inside, one that had been fashioned by a race that lived during the dawn of the galaxy. They had retreated into it to consummate their journey to the absolute pinnacle of evolution. In their wake, the Void was now slowly consuming the remaining stars in the galaxy. In that it was no different from the natural black holes found anchoring the centre of many galaxies; but while they employed gravity and entropy to pull in mass, the Void actively devoured stars.