The void around Ren Kagu was rotting.
That was the only word for it. Space, which should have been a clean, crystalline black, was blistering like film held to a flame. Greenish-purple light seeped from wounds in nothing. The stars behind it smeared. The sorcerer Archduke had abandoned the fleet-wide curse he'd been weaving the instant Ren appeared at his flank, swallowed the backlash without a flinch, and thrown everything he had at the single silent figure who had walked through his wards as if they were curtains.
He called it the Curse of Miasmic Reality. Ren had read the name in the Seven's fragmented intelligence files, next to a list of the worlds it had ended. Whole crews driven mad. Whole armies dissolved, not by being killed, but by forgetting why they were fighting.
It came at him from every side at once.
