Black Glass Throne

The Silent King returned to a time before the Ark had been built and watched from afar as the Finalizers constructed the Golden Throne atop the Old Ones' corpse floating through the cosmos.

He summoned the chronomancers of this timeline to his side and used the Silent King's authority to access the Brilliant Star Map.

Dropping a meteor onto a desolate planet, or raising a hand to hasten a star's eruption—amid the shifting positions of the stars, the Silent King was weaving the grandest butterfly effect of all.

As time quietly passed, the Silent King sat desiccated upon his throne, watching the altered planets affect the movements of two star systems and force them toward one another.

Planets collided and became clouds of shattered debris, but what mattered most was the pull between stars.

To limit the scope of the effects, the Silent King had deliberately selected two white dwarfs for this task.

The two white dwarfs orbited extremely close to each other. Energy was released in the form of gravitational waves, driving both stars inward in a spiral until the merged star exceeded the Chandrasekhar Limit—1.44 times the Sun's mass.

Carbon burning caused the white dwarfs' temperatures to surge. The runaway fusion reaction rapidly spread and heated the merged star from within, releasing in an instant the total radiative energy the Sun would emit over its entire lifetime.

Electromagnetic radiation illuminated the entire star system, taking several months to fade into invisibility.

The destruction of the two star systems not only deprived the Finalizers and the rebels of two resource worlds for producing armies, but also subjected the rebel robots attacking the Ark afterward to electromagnetic radiation.

Even the slightest weakening could turn the tide of battle in another direction. The entire Ark would originally have been left with