Welcome to stories from Among the Stars. You're listening to The Last Watch by J.S. Dewas.

Chapter 3

Kavalon hadn't grown up in space. He'd spent his formative years firmly planted on the

Terra of Elizia until his 13th birthday brought him to the ritual coronation grounds on the planet's only moon.

So he well remembered what it had been like to meet the universe for the first time.

You're looking into the past, his father had told him. By the time the light reaches you, those

stars could be dust. It had been awe-inspiring and humbling. He'd never felt so small. That is, until now, as he stood in front of an

observation window on the Argus, though observation was generous, he squinted and pressed his face closer to the glass to get a better look at nothing.

But not the nothing of a moonless night or the barren space between solar systems or galaxies,

this was the nothing of the divide of the edge of the universe.

An invisible barrier formed millions of years ago when the collective mass of the

Cosmos finally balanced out the dark energy, slowing and eventually halting the previously ever expanding universe, a border that

separated all matter from the void that lay beyond, the literal edge of nowhere. He'd never beyond the that somehow went beyond dark, beyond vacuum, or abyss, or void, or any word that could even

begin to aptly describe it.

There were no twinkling stars, hundreds or thousands or millions of light years away,

unreachable by practical means, but still present, still proof of something

millennia gone.

There was just nothing, and there never had been, and there never would be. It was

terrifying. A hand patted him on the back, jarring him from his reverie.

A tall man with bronze skin and a shaved head stood next to him, grinning out at the vast emptiness.

Views better inward, the man said, in my humble opinion. He tapped the black band on his

wrist, activating a small holographic screen above his forearm.

...