The wing bursts out of collapsing jump-light beside the armored battle-whale Indomitable; ahead, the Gulper's glowing gullet and the Hollow swarm wait beneath an arc of seven colored moons.

The first session in the void — and the night the table learned that space is not a bigger quarry. It is a place where the guns fire twice, where the rocks are both shield and hammer, and where the worst thing the Hollow can do to you is not kill you. It is keep you.

The wing snapped out of the jump escorting the Indomitable home — and the jump gate slammed shut behind them. A Still-Well hung in the dark holding the lock. Around it: the Gulper with its impossible mouth, the Kraken trailing forty hexes of tractor-reach, twelve arrow-worm Barbs, two armored isopods, and a clamshell prison called the Abalone, waiting to be filled.

First space battleThe swarm that would not dieTwo Cantors in the tentaclesThree taken. Three brought home.Seven natural 20s

  • The faucet and the drift

    The opening rounds were a war of arithmetic. The wing carved Barbs out of the black — Psyche spearing them two at a time on natural 20s, Shadow's railgun finally waking up, the Indomitable's bow chasers vaporizing one outright — and the Gulper answered every kill by birthing fresh ones from its gullet, faster each round. The asteroid drift Michael had seeded across the middle of the board became the whole game: duck behind a rock and the Hollow's fire broke against stone; stray from it and the swarm stacked six accuracy dice on your back. Magus wrote the lesson in wreckage — an afterburner ram that hammered a Barb two hexes into a boulder, where the collision finished what the ram began. First rock-kill in campaign history.

  • The Kraken earns its name

    Then the tractor ship chose its prey. Monolyth first — held fast in a grip that took Monolyth three straining rolls across three rounds to break. Then Psyche, hooked at range and dragged bodily through the asteroid field, hull screaming off a rock, down to a single hit point in the tentacles. The board's own physics wrote the horror beat: no GM fiat, just a grapple, a drift, and geometry.

  • Nine creature-capitals erupt from a blinding teal warp bloom — the Chambered Hall leading the Manta, the Narwhal, the Hammerhead and the fleet — as black-green Hollow hulks turn to meet them.

    Three go dark

    Mid-fight, the table adopted a new law of the void: a Cantor beaten to zero is not destroyed — the Hollow takes them.Within one round the swarm proved why that rule has teeth. Magus went dark. Then Orca. Then Shadow. Three of five, stowed alive in the Abalone's shell, and over the table's comms a voice that had been silent for days finally spoke:

    “Be still, little Cantors. Three of you already sleep in the shell. Now — we will take you home.” — the Still King

    Monolyth's answer went out on an open channel: “Captain — incoming support. HOLD FAST.” And the trap the Hollow had built sprang in both directions at once: eight necrotic capitals resonance-warping in on the wing — and nine world-song capitals landing with them, the Chambered Hall leading Sounding, the Anchorite, the Narwhal, Aurelia, the Manta, the Dactyl, the Hammerhead, the Elder, guns already turning. Aurelia pulled all three captives out of the shell alive. The planet itself answered the King:

    “No. These are OURS. Every song you stilled, we remember — and we are many, and we are LOUD. Come, children. Come home the other way.” — the Unison

  • The aftermath in the void: five scarred fighter-Colossi drift at the center of the creature-fleet — the whale, the Narwhal, the Manta, the Chambered Hall — among tumbling Hollow wreckage, the Vespertide rolling its luminous band over the ocean world and its seven moons, the jump gate open at last.

    The field, after

    One round of capital war — broadsides, torpedo trails, the Vespertide rolling its luminous band beneath everything — and the Hollow broke. The interdiction generator died, the jump gate breathed open, and the enemy fleet ran. When the light faded, the board held only friends: five Cantors, scarred and whole, ringed by the armada that had come for them, drifting in a field of quiet stone.

    Nobody was lost. Everybody was taken back. The Still King went home empty-handed — and for the first time, he knows their names.

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