Author’s Note: This one’s tough. The sun doesn’t rise anymore and the moon is anchored to the planet. Maybe I can just… Forget all that in the name of some romance…
We sat upon the roof in our respective chairs. Hot drinks in our hands, we watched as a long dead galaxy rose over the horizon. Eons ago this swirl of starlight existed countless lightyears away, but now it’s echo rose over the broken moon that tethered our world to the Void.
It felt so close that I could reach out and touch it. Feel the burning of the stars on my skin. I wonder how many lives once inhabited it’s worlds. How many species were ended by the Void? How many escaped into the peace of a natural extinction? How old had these stars been before being extinguished by the cold march of time?
It felt so strange to think about all these things. Isolating but somehow nostalgic at the same time. I’d never know those people. I’d never speak their language or eat their food. I’d never know a single thing about their lives and yet in that memory that hung in our Ancora sky, singular moments of their existence were frozen. Still outside of my reach.
I wanted to know them. To understand them in some way. Travel their stars just as I wish I could travel mine. How far had their lights come to be here and now?
I sipped my coffee and Sylus sipped his tea.
I wonder what he’s thinking. How does he feel about this alien body gliding across our sky?
Our conduit opened and I felt his sadness. Lamentations of what could have been. Some part of him had seen some of those worlds. Some part of him had lived among those people. But that part would never speak on it. Qaitax wasn’t one to linger on the past. What to me felt like an insurmountable distance of time and space was a mere blink of an eye to the dead lord that lurked behind my lover’s eyes.
Time crept on and the galaxy made it’s way behind us. A million suns setting on our horizon. Would they rise again tomorrow? Or would another memory take their place?
I sipped my coffee and Sylus sipped his tea.
Author’s Closing Note: Nice and prose-y, this one. I think it went a lot better than expected. 😊
Eternity's Irys 