“W-what is she saying?” he asked, concentrating on the ancient Solani’s lips, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. “And who is she?”

“The C’zar,” Elara said in a little more than a whisper. “Koren Vey. The one who led the arks here. Her light is trapped here. Koren Vey is the one who led me to you, Princess.” Then she told the hologram of the Solani something in the Old Language.

The image glitched and replied quietly. Elara’s eyebrows furrowed. She listened more intently.

“What’s she saying?” Ana asked, and then turned to the projection. “Do you know how to defeat the Great Dark? Or at least how to find it and—”

“Yes,” the hologram replied.

Robb blinked. The words felt fuzzy and strange, like when his foot went to sleep and left it tingly. “Do you hear that? I understood her.”

The hologram turned to him with an unwavering violet gaze that reminded him so achingly of Jax. “Your C’zar had his light stolen.”

Robb felt gooseflesh ripple across his skin. “How . . . how do you know that?”

“I have foreseen it a thousand years ago. I have been waiting for you—and you, daughter of the moon,” she added to Ana. “We do not have much time.”

Koren Vey raised her arms. “You want to save your kingdom, but to understand how to, you must understand how we have come to this moment. The entity you wish to destroy has no beginning, and no end, but the story of the D’thverek is the same in every galaxy.”

The D’thverek—it was the Solani word for the Great Dark.

“It is a creature that feeds on light—life. In each galaxy, the Goddess is born to stop it, but in each galaxy she fails, and the D’thverek drains their light, destroying all living things, and moves to the next. It cannot survive without light, for it has none of its own. When it came for us, our C’zars had foreseen that we could not defeat it, so we fled. This ark was the only one to escape. And here it rests, where you stand in its bones.”

The holographic galaxy morphed into a set of constellations Robb knew well—the Iron Kingdom. It looked so different, though, from all the maps he’d studied over the course of his life. It was the Iron Kingdom from the C’zar’s perspective. Eros was not the shining planet that the maps depicted, and Iliad was not dark and damp, and Cerces was larger than both of them combined, all wrapped together, surrounded by the asteroid belt that kept whatever lurked outside from coming in. The kingdom looked so small and delicate. How could it defeat something that had lived lifetimes by feasting on the lives—even worlds—of others?

Looking at the map of his home, he realized just how terrified he was. The Great Dark had always been a myth—a bedtime story to tell naughty children—but now that he knew it had taken his ma’alor, that it was coming for the rest of them, it suddenly felt viscerally real.