Sunny held Adam in her arms, cradling his war ravaged body against her chest as she rocked silently back and forth. A part of her thought about briefly leaving him there, running over to the railing and looking for her father, as if there was any chance that he might have escaped kazna, let her fall and survived himself.

But she didn't move.

She knew better.

Drev loved only once. It didn't matter what Kazna had done or what she had said, there was always a part of Lanus that loved her. So despite her misguided hope, she knew.

Lanus had chosen to fall with her.

He had chosen to stop existing, to save his children, to save the universe, and for that little bit of him to stay with her, to destroy himself as he destroyed her.

Blood slicked the metal beneath her.

Her body ached, and as she knelt, a weakness spread into her limbs that made it hard to hold herself upright. She was so tired, so tired even weeping was becoming too much of a chore, and though Adam was growing heavy, she didn't want to put him down.

The skin of his face had gone ghostly white in the near darkness. His hair was slicked with sweat, plastered against his forehead in little tendrils. The UV stripes, visible on his face, were just a little off. She rested a hand against the skin of his cheek, cold to the touch. Little sparks of white energy hung in the air around the ring, flickering like fireflies against the night sky, falling like snow in meandering trails towards the gravity mats below.

Other shapes moved in the near darkness, but she didn't look up.

She was so tired.

She stroked a thumb over Adam's cold cheek.

"Let me see what I can do."

Sunny barely heard the words, and it took krill another two times of repeating it before she acknowledged his presence, shifting her arms so Krill could get a better look. She turned Adam gently to the side so krill could see the devastation that Kazna had brought.

Krill sucked in a sharp breath.

Her heart sank just a little more.

"We have to move him now, I can help.... But we need to do it fast." Krill said,

Problem was, the portal was gone. They had gotten here but, it seemed, now that Apollyon was gone, he had taken the portals with him. Still, the two of them looked, as if expecting the portal to have been moved to a more convenient location over the course of their fight.

But they found nothing.

They were stuck here

Sunny clutched Adam a bit tighter.

Would the makers let her see her children again once she died.

Who would raise them if not?

She and Adam had failed to talk about that before they left. It was negligent of them not to have spoken, but neither of them had been prepared for a conversation as devastating as their children losing both parents. It was either one of them came back or Apollyon won and it didn't matter anymore.

Sunny lowered her head, continued to rock back and forth humming gently to Adam whose eyes were still open.

She wished he would just pass out, at least then he wouldn't be in pain.

"You can sleep now" She said softly, "It's.... Okay."

Adam shook his head, and though his eyes were distan't and his words slurred, he still spoke, "I don't want to leave you alone."

A similar scene was playing out not so distantly. Ramirez had extracted himself from his crushed armor and crawled over to where Maverick lay, face down, on the deck one hand dangling over the side. Golden light pulsed around her in jagged edges like the paint peeling off an old car. When he touched her, the light shifted some of it shedding and dissipating into the metal.

He tried to hold her gently for fear that she would turn to ash in his hands.

"Maverick..... Maverick."

She didn't respond.

Krill still knelt at Adam's side helpless to do much with the field kit he had brought along with him. He couldn't fix anima injury, so could do nothing for maverick, but even Adam's injuries were bodily catastrophic. The nerve damage alone would take a year or more of rehabilitation even in the best scenario, with all of the most advanced technology.

If they didn't get him into surgery soon, there was no doubt in Krill's mind he'd be paralyzed from the chest down if not the neck.

Sunny dropped her head onto his chest and hummed sadly, unable to put into words what she was feeling.

It was the soft, golden light that alerted them to his presence.

At first Sunny's heart leapt, hoping beyond hope it was her father escaped from Kazna's clutches, but it took no more than a glance to prove herself incorrect.

The architect floated softly down from the darkness. The burning white light had mostly gone away, spent in an effort to Destroy Apollyon's forces, leaving behind only a visible echo of that power. The golden halo that surrounded his body was dim enough to leave his features apparent. The architect's silhouette was human, but beyond that he chose no specific form. His face and skin morphed continually across the spectrum of humanity, dark to light, masculine to feminine, and aged and withered all the way down to a youthful prime.

It was disconcerting, but Sunny didn't have the energy to stare.

Krill and Ramirez remained silent as the architect approached ribbons of golden light trailing behind him as he walked. WHerever he stepped, he left a glowing golden footprint.

"Thank you." He said softly, "Creation is in your debt."

The words meant something big, but none of them could think large enough to comprehend it.

Creation.

Everything.

"I am sorry I could not have done more, but my power had been waning for some time. You have restored balance to the cosmic scales."

Krill frowned, "Wait, you didn't destroy him?"

"It is not possible to destroy apollyon, like it is impossible to destroy me. But like the balance of the ecosystem, so too must the universe find its balance. When the scale tips, those held within suffer." He raised a hand and gestured to the black hole, "Apollyon does not understand this. He and I have no beginning and we have no end, we cannot exist without one or the other to destroy one would destroy us both.... The result of such a thing is..... Incomprehensible, even to me. What you stopped was a fate worse than simply not existing."

Sunny didn't speak.

Adam looked like he wanted to say something, but the bloodloss had taken his tongue.

"Please...." Was the only thing Sunny managed.

The architect raised his hands, and as he did, there appeared in the sky behind him a very familiar shape.

Glowing white like a beautiful cosmic ribbon, Smaug turned in a slow spiral Maleficent hanging at his neck. The architect stepped back, slowly growing in size as he stepped off the platform to hover within the vacuum. Gently, he reached out, and plucked the group of them from the deck, cradling them easily in the palms of his hands as he turned towards Smaug.

The group of them experienced no ill effects, needed no space suits.

Smaug Spiraled around, clasping his own tail firmly in his jaws to summon a warp portal through which the architect gently deposited them.

***

They had lost so much

Though they had won, the aftermath of the battle was devastation. Little did they know, but Apollyon's supporters had not been simply relegated to the necritorium. All across the galaxies and worlds, void soldiers were given the task of dealing death in an effort to funnel energy towards their dark god.

The death toll was somewhere in the trillions and climbing ever higher with every passing day.

Some worlds had it worse than others.

Earth had lost an entire city to a single nuclear missile strike perpetrated by void soldiers.

Irus, the center of the void outbreak, had been rendered uninhabitable, its vast tracts of blue desert sand had been glassed into a single sheet of radioactive wasteland. Its great ruins and capital city had been obliterated, and its delicate ecosystem had been entirely annihilated. It was lucky that the Rundi' had been recolonizing multiple planets for the past thousand years, and many had managed to escape even before the glassing, but still

Tragedy was an understatement.

The Rundi no longer had a homeworld.

Noctopolis had broken out into all out war.

The Tesraki homeworld lost thousands in building collapses and bombings.

The Tvek and the Kree were no more

All across the galaxies, there was devastation.

Arcadia was the only planet that had seen casualties below triple digits, and even then most of the dead had been void infected soldiers.

Some were calling it the battle of Armigeddon, the day of reckoning, the end of times as foretold in so many religious texts across creeds and species.

Others weren't so sure.

As for personal losses, there were many.

The Chairwoman of the GA

Naktan

Simon, and the crew of the Omen

Captain McCaster

Queen Xanthia

Hijan- Who died in brave combat for honor

Jane - taken by artillery fire.

General Kimball

Admiral Palmer

Admiral Koslov

And to Sunny's added agony

Kanan and Dzara, both Killed fighting to hold the Gate.

And now she was alone, the only surviving member of her family.

The rest had died, their Anima sucked into the Necrotorium funnel, and then used to augment the architect. The Makers promised that the broken souls could be collected and put back together. But a thousand years might as well be eternity when you are mortal, and basically eternity even as a Maker.

In the days following Armageddon, the world limped back to life, the universe went on, but there were still scars, reminders of what they had lost.

In agreements between constructs and Makers, it was agreed that all Makers return to Revelation. Kelly agreed on the condition that she could serve to the end of her terms, what was a matter of four to eight years for eternity. Celex outright refused, telling the makers he would come when he was damn ready, but at least agreed to keep a low profile.

The makers would cut contact, revelation would be moved.

They would vanish into obscurity.

All those who had received Animectomy procedures agreed to have the effects reversed until the time of their natural deaths. Krill was mildly disappointed but eventually, and grudgingly agreed.

Adam made a mostly full recovery.

The Steel Eye project and all of its iterations were shut down permanently and direct nerve-linked equipment for the purpose of military application was banned galaxy-wide.

Statues were erected, the first on Arcadia, the second on Anin.

The savior of the universe.

Lanus the saint of Golden Light

A figure that would rise to almost deity-like qualities in the coming years

Adam abdicated his throne on Arcadia as did Eris, though she had better things to do.

It was hard to run a planet when you have been appointed the newest and youngest ever chairwoman of the GA.

King James remained king of the spartans, but handed power over to the most surprising candidate, and one Adam was entirely unsure about for the first few months.

Conn made a surprisingly good president, aside from his habit of leering through Adam's bedroom window for the fun of it.

Numerous Starborn nations joined the GA.

Both Adam and Sunny, neither entirely made for the simple life, dedicated themselves to intergalactic exploration and diplomacy, everything they had missed from the old days.

There were still plenty of things in the universe to fight.

Adam finally went back to school for a doctoral degree in "cool science stuff" he always wanted to do but thought he couldn't specifically xenobiology.

Krill continued to write journals, argue with Riss and occasionally go on missions.

Maverick recovered, and though the going was slow, her long time friendship with Ramirez healed and might have grown into something else.

Kay Astra and Nyx grew up under the watchful eye of their grandfather's statue proudly standing on the square outside the spiral tower.