They made their way slowly down the length of the transparent tube that linked the orbital docks to the waiting starship ahead, pulling themselves hand over through weightlessness.

Through the dark gulfs where no one goes, through the emptiness, through the silence that goes on and on, my Nightflyer and I give chase. When I was grown, the volcryn had sailed beyond Tara, past the range of even the Crey, still heading outward.Īnd now I am old and growing older and the volcryn will soon pierce the Tempter’s Veil where it hangs like a black mist between the stars. That season all the Crey sensitives grew strange and sat staring at the stars with luminous, flickering eyes. When I was a child of three Kleronomas was dust, as distant and dead as Jesus of Nazareth, and the volcryn passed close to Daronne. Not then and not on his return to Avalon, a lifetime later. Kleronomas found many things, but he did not find the volcryn. When Kleronomas took his survey ship out from Avalon, the volcryn came within ten light years of him. Afterwards, the Federal Empire was shattered and gone, and the Hrangans vanished in the dark of the Collapse, but it was no darker for the volcryn. War flamed for a thousand years and the volcryn passed through it, unknowing and untouched, safe in a place where no fires could ever burn. Like us they were children of the small bright worlds that circled their scattered suns, with little interest and less knowledge of the things that moved in the gulfs between. By the time the stardrive had transformed the Federated Nations of Earth into the Federal Empire, the volcryn had moved into the fringes of Hrangan space. When the Fire Wars raged on Earth, the volcryn sailed near Old Poseidon, where the seas were still unnamed and unfished. When Jesus of Nazareth hung dying on his cross, the volcryn passed within a year of his agony, headed outward.

George rr martin nightflyers book