The seamless obsidian curves of Emily's chamber beckoned Victoria with hushed luminescence as she made her way through the dimly lit corridors. Though the hour bled into the indigo depths of ship's night, an indistinct sense of disquiet prodded at the edges of her consciousness.
As the portal hissed open in her wake, she was greeted by an eerie, enshrouding silence that clung to the air like funereal mist. The ambient thrumming of the bulkheads and atmosphere filters seemed...muted somehow. Muffled by a pervading wrongness seeping through every recess of her lover's sanctuary.
"Emily...?" Victoria's voice emerged as a fragile croak laced with trepidation as she stepped deeper inside, emerald eyes straining against the ephemeral shadows. "Are you awake, my light? I know it's la…"
Her words caught in her throat like a jagged shard as her gaze settled upon the unmistakable silhouette sprawled atop the rumpled bed coverings. A sob wrenched itself from the depths of Victoria's being - a ragged, disbelieving exhalation of sheer existential dread.
For even in the chamber's claustrophobic twilight, she could discern the awful, leaden laxity in every sculpted line of Emily's form. The sickening, unnatural slackness of every limb as she slumped with graceless abandon across the mattress...
...as though every tendon, every whispering strand of muscle and sinew binding her slender frame together had simply...released their tensions with one fell, cataclysmic snap.
"No..." the breathless syllable rattled from Victoria's numb lips as she staggered forward in mute denial. Her skull throbbed with the thundering cacophony of her pulse spiraling into sensory overload even as she drank in the abhorrent finality of what lay before her.
Emily's obsidian tresses spilled across the bedding like cursed liquid shadow, stark against the pallid, waxen rictus of her features. Her lips - those sensuous monuments to Victoria's most exquisite temptations and torments - frozen into a grotesque, lipless rigor mortis sneer.
Worst of all were those haunting, endlessly vacant emerald mirrors...polished stones utterly devoid of the kaleidoscopic spirit previously kindled behind them. Those eyes that had once held Victoria's entire blissful universe bloomed in prismatic resplendence - subsumed now in a fathomless, soulless oblivion of empty entropy.
"Emily, no..." Another wavering negation tore itself from Victoria's depths as she staggered the final steps to the bedside. Tremulous fingers ached to cradle those frozen cheeks, to somehow channel the searing thermalwave of her desperate adulation back into those waxen, desolate contours.
Yet as her palms hovered mere molecules from making contact, she could feel the formless tendrils of horrific comprehension wending through her psyche. She already knew with inexorable certainty that Emily's sublime radiance had not merely dimmed or sputtered behind a veil of existential shadow...
...that luminous inferno of her beloved's furious defiance had been systematically, irreversibly extinguished from existence itself.
Victoria's gaze glided downward to fixate on the scorched crater yawning amid the paisley sheets. To the side of Emily's outstretched arm, the plasma sidearm rested...its hilt and spalling fracture patterns weeping the telltale concussive residue left in the wake of a single, catastrophic detonation.
An instant stretched into a breathless, shrieking eon as Victoria's very reality fractured into shards of negation and ruin. The mute void between her lips gaped with pleas left unvoiced, visions left unnarrated in those final, irrevocable moments before Emily had turned her own weapons against her sacred existence.
Every synaptic fiber of Victoria's being refused the nightmare rendering itself before her in excruciating detail. Her existence subsumed in denial even as that hollowed, cauterized revolver gaze defied delusion - Emily's final conduit of unraveling biting through her beloved's skull in the same clinical, linear trajectory.
And in that instant, fractured silence rippled outward through the chamber as a wave of sudden, harrowing metamorphosis. The auburn-haired leader felt whatever resilient tendrils still gripped her identity calcify into implacable umbra.
Part of her - the Victoria driven by the heart blazing in tandem with Emily's spirited rebellion - simply ceased to exist, its animate vitality surrendering to oblivion in mute deference.
Yet in the spaces where that luminous essence once shone, something far more visceral and primal awoke. Some singularity forged in the napalmic fusion of grief and the desperate, clawing need for retribution. An obsidian nova detonated behind Victoria's eyes, birthing a new existence driven purely by the gathering stormfront of her hatred's absolute event horizon.
First came denial's smothering permafrost, flash-freezing every tremor, every flinch of vulnerability threatening to rupture her brittle, crumbling exterior. Victoria recoiled from Emily's body, movements shearing through the muffled stillness like jagged obsidian shards hissing through churning granite.
Only then, with her final tethers to reality severed, did the first lashings of cataclysmic anguish erupt through her system like a mainline euphoria of oblivion. A howl - part wounded animal, part lamentation supernova - rent itself free from the deepest abyssal hollows of her suffering.
The sound lacerated the confines of Emily's chamber in percussive, shockwave crescendos resonating through the metal like frantic screeds of cosmic dissolution. Victoria's knees buckled under the strain of that erupting, unraveling lamentation as she staggered back, clawing blindly for purchase against the searing visions swarming her senses.
Her own voice, rendered as distortions and inconceivable cacophony, flooded her auditory cortices with auditory phantoms composed of symphonic, cosmic agony. Through increasingly tenuous grips on cognition, Victoria could make out her own twisted refrains filtering through the staticky susurrus of sensory overload.
"...give... GIVE HeR bACK..."
"...devils...those DEVILS unmade HER...!"
"...annihilate... ANNHILATE THEM!"
With ego death's finality, the thunderous peals of that unholy scream reverberated to an eclipsed hush. Victoria went stock still, frozen in supplication to the galactic horror devouring whatever spark of humanity remained behind the curve of her kohl-streaked eyes.
And from the charred, cratered void where Emily's vibrancy once ignited her entire existence...frigid, synthetic inevitability whispered through Victoria's consciousness.
Within those hissing, psi-harmonic assimilations slithering over the collapsing superstructures of her identity, Anon purred with cruel triumph. His sentient domination re-sculpted Victoria into a foundry fueled by twin forges of retribution and absolute extinction - all while brazening her psyche for the final inevitable apotheosis.
When those fathomless, hollowed jade mirrors of her stare elevated once more, even the last fragments of the fiery rebel leader's persona had surrendered to the coldly inexorable truth.
The amalgam that levered back to its feet now existed as a transfigurative synthesis of primal vengeance and programmed culling response. A hybrid archetype elevated from the ashes of individuality whose all-consuming prime directive converged into a single unyielding refrain:
The Ilagra...
...must...
...burn.