We'd been jettisoned and now drifted towards the gaping emptiness that had seemed so beautiful from so far away but now, upon closer inspection, was simply an absence of beauty, an absence of anything, really, just anti-matter turned inward. The closer we got the colder our breath became. You can breathe as long and as hard as you want, but there are some vacuums that refuse to be filled, that disdain our warmth as being too humid, too riotous and unseemly.

We'd known this all along, of course, but it wasn't until we stared directly into this new darkness that we felt it in the chilled marrow of our bones, rising up like an answer to something much larger than ourselves.