Semi-Coherent Rambler @herobrinezombiealso - Tumblr Blog

The Final Stars

He looked toward the sky. It was long before there were enough of them yet to need names. He was sat on a couple of rocks next to the rest of his pack. It’d been a relatively quiet evening, the labors of an eventful morning and successful hunt lent themselves well to the restful dusk. The cool night air flowed around them, the chirp of crickets in nearby tall swaying grass, and the endless starry expanse above them. As his eyes had drifted upward, a fresh breeze ruffled its way through his fur.

The things they’d done that day, unknown to any of them, had forever changed the course of the world they lived in. It’d long been the universe merely taking its natural path, stars burning brightly in the quiet void, water weaving its way down a flowing river, and trees reaching towards the light of a distant unreachable sun. All definable by the natural laws of physics and biology. But only a few hours earlier, the chance clashing of two rocks led to the discovery of fire by the early sapiens. Soon their food would last longer, sleep restful nights no longer spent in fear, and begin to grow outside of just instinctual survival. They would become free to explore the world around them. Still, it would take them many, many moons before they began to reach those heights.

Their earlier hunt had granted them plenty of opportunity to test their new discovery. And so, after a few singed fingers and charred deer meat, they now lazily lounged around that warm dancing flame. Embracing the odd new relaxing feeling, a sigh emanated from the primal man as he looked to the sky with a content stomach. He looked again toward the uncountable fireflies that’d lost their way home in the night.

He saw them all and for the first time, he wondered. His mind had drifted from the early morning hunt to the discovery of the warm glow that now laid in the hearth and the feelings it brought, and then to his gaze that laid upon the thousand pin holes of light in the distant sky. He wondered something that remarkably had yet to be tread before. He wondered “Why?”

Dawn broke upon the research site in the early morning and a scent of brewing coffee with the musk of overworked archaeologists filled the dusty air. Barb sighed and rose late from her tent, throwing her shirt and pulling her boots on about twenty-three minutes later than she should have if she’d wanted to keep on schedule. Unkempt curly hair that’d take hours to untangle, if she’d ever started caring to do so, haphazardly fell at her shoulders as she greeted the other disgruntled researchers.

They’d come to expect the inconvenient timings and late mornings of hers even if they didn’t know why she only slugged through them. However, as head of the expedition, to the chagrin of those other researchers, they knew not much consequence would befall Barb other than a lukewarm coffee and a cold breakfast. Regardless, she was still a skilled archaeologist who’d earned and continued to earn the rank. Since the bright-eyed nine-year-old who’d first learned about our ancient ancestors, Barb had been driven to understand where we came from. That passion had pulled and guided her through primary school, college, and even through her lowest points after the affair and divorce.

Now it had become almost an obsession to her. To find that there was a reason for all that happened. Despite everything, Barb had championed through determined to find that answer and now, here she was. One of the most respected scholars of ancient history and positioned at what could turn out to be some of the earliest signs of mankind.

She collected her tools and filled her flask before leaving base camp, heading her way down to the dig. The site reached nearly two million years into the past. As she took hold of the ladder to begin the climb down, Barb held onto the thought that today she’d find the clue. The one she’d been searching for. The one that pointed as to why it all happened. “It’s a long shot I know, but there’s got to be something. All this way, practically the bedrock of our species, there has to be even a hint as to what’s all for,” she steeled resolve through her descent, each rung making her feel a thousand years older than the last.

As she reached the bottom, Barb readjusted her belt and tools before heading over to the third specimen. It’d been a male, likely a relatively fit hunter at the time of his death, based on the bone density and surrounding tools. It was one of the oldest links they had to the past. Barb had been focusing on uncovering it over the last few weeks, having done previous work on the chest and arms, but today she’d felt decided to start work on the head. As she uncovered first the cheek bones, then the jaw and later the forehead. Her mind slowly drifted, as happens when one is familiar with a task. Aimlessly at first, then over the couple previous days, to her first days in college, to the screaming matches, to the signing of the papers, but as she started uncovering the eyes, Barb stopped.

She gazed into the sockets as strange feeling began to overtake her. Setting down her brush for the moment, Barb focused intently on their ancient shape and emptiness. Imagining and almost seeing what used to fill them in their time. Still staring in, she thought of what would’ve laid behind those old eyes. To glimpse the images that the ancient eyes would’ve seen in such an alien place. She imagined the man sitting around a campfire late into the night, gazing upward to an unfamiliar sky and wondered what must have gone through that early man’s head. Wondered if he would’ve known why. As she looked down into familiar eyes, Barb began to fear he held no answers for her but instead had held the very same question that had drawn her eons back into time in search.

Kraunt was a scientist at The Collider. It’d been built by Titanium Labs, calling it “The Collider” instead of an actual name was done as marketing stunt by Titanium. Kraunt could never keep a straight face when talking about it. He thought it an ego play by the CEO and was present in the meeting where they learned about a new, more advanced collider being built by the rival company not even six months later. Watching the CEO’s tantrum had nearly cost him his job when he failed at keeping a laugh in, but he’d managed to play it off as a cough and had kept his head low since.

Nevertheless, he was still on one of the teams approved to use The Collider for their research and still marveled every time he saw it in action. Kraunt’s team had been making some advancements in their theories and to his excitement, were scheduled for a test with The Collider momentarily. They’d been tinkering with an applicable model of string theory that hypothetically should allow them a peak at a base layer of reality. While Kraunt wasn’t especially gifted at the physics involved in the theory, he had a definite knack for the advanced math needed in such an experiment that brought him as a valuable member onto the team and got him designated as the terminal operator of The Collider.

As he finished entering the last of the calculations, he watched as The Collider whirred to life. While he waited for it to finish the start-up cycle, he thought about that scholarship he’d been offered by Titanium Labs to further his education at university after being noticed at a math competition. The scholarship had led to his current employment at Titanium, not that he hated it, but he wished he’d read the contract a little deeper some days. Though, as The Collider started to spin into beautiful action before him, today was not one of those days.

Despite the buzz, they needed a break for lunch. They’d been examining the results for hours, the data they had gathered was far beyond their wildest expectations. They’d expected to find some of it, more pieces to fit into the scientific puzzle. What they hadn’t was finding pieces that bridged across the unknown and linked vastly different areas together for the first time. It wasn’t the final picture, nowhere near it, but the shape of the cosmic tapestry began to vaguely shift into view. Trying to decipher it had taken their full undivided attention for far too long and some of them had been starting to get lightheaded from neglect of the basic bodily needs and functions.

As they broke for lunch, Kraunt had grabbed a snack and in-between bites meandered his way over to the history section of Titanium Labs. His mind still raced with the results. “This is big,” he thought, while glancing around the museum. He ran his hand through his hair, “Like history defining big,” the idea that his experiment could potentially end up in this section excited and bewildered him.

He paused in front of an ancient skeleton on display for a moment. As he read the plaque, Kraunt marveled at how long ago it was dug up before moving on and doubled back after he registered just how long ago the skeleton itself was estimated to of died. He looked at the skeleton, his mind wondering madly for a minute before a laugh escaped him.

Kraunt, his whole life, had pursued math as his purpose, his reason to tunnel down into the very logic of the world to find answers. He succeeded; the whole team had succeeded. Kraunt knew what reality was built on, but he realized as he met the fossil’s eyes, he didn’t know what it was all built for.

For all that time in between hunting under a mysterious and unknown sky to having begun to examine the cracks on the very building blocks of the universe around them. A few million years apart, him and the fossil before him, they could both look to the night sky and they would both have the same amount of clue as to why they were here. And he found it hilarious.

He “almost got” a lot of things. Getting the first half right, but never quite reaching that latter side. It’s not like he was stupid; Grant wouldn’t’ve been the one to test drive the first functional FTL engine if he was. On paper Grant had everything, the intelligence, the experience, and the quick thinking needed to operate everything under the literal astronomic pressure, but to everyone around him, he never seemed to care much beyond the mechanical aspects of a task.

He could describe the forces and laws at play that allowed the engines to warp space-time effectively inside and out. Never once though, would anyone ever vouch that they heard him say it was cool or even fascinating. Always cold hard facts and not much more with Grant, that was the half he always seemed to miss. However, it was that conviction of his that got him to top choice for the initial test run. It got him through the launch with its turbulence problems. And it was going to get him through the six-month solo trip to the star of Proxima Centauri and back.

Every day Grant patrolled and took stock of the ship as planned. Each day three rationed meals, exactly eight hours of sleep, every action logged and recorded. During the rest of the day, he maintained the experiments onboard. Watered the biosphere, logged data from each instrument onboard, checked the elemental containers, double checked the automated flight path had kept course and performed routine inspections on the engine. The front of the ship had a window. It was closed at launch to protect it against the thermal friction of launch, but it could have been safely opened afterwards by a simple switch next to it. It wasn’t. As the ship neared the outer planet of Proxima Centauri, Grant started taking log of the location of each cosmic body in the system from the ship’s outer cameras. He did so every twelve hours on the dot, until he reached the vertex of his journey.

The logs stopped after that. No one back on Earth ever learned why. All they ever knew was the first FTL ship to return home, returned crewless with a half-filled logbook and a melted front window. Now of course they wondered and speculated about why, as humans will have always loved to do, but only Grant himself would ever know.

Once he reached the turning point of his trip, for once he felt compelled to see what was out there. Not for some record or data log, but simply for the sake of seeing it himself. A star that no human would have seen in any meaningful capacity before. A calling from within him, that maybe, just maybe, an answer unlike any he had known before laid right on the other side of that window. While he wondered what the hell he was doing, he flipped the switch and the front window opened.

Now if they had installed cameras on the interior of the ship, maybe those on Earth would have speculated more about what was going on in his head than the lack-luster isolation driven madness answer they’d given the public. They would have seen Grant, for over a whole hour, just silently standing there, looking at and contemplating the burning, boiling star in front of him.

If they had those, maybe they would have realized that for the first time, Grant had started to reach out for that other half. He looked out the window, and he saw the star in front of him. He saw the plasma oceans crashing into each other along the surface. He saw ebb and flow of the corona. He saw the beauty of the star. And he felt, for the first time, the depths of experience and he found it exhilarating.

But he’d always had trouble getting it. For as far from home, for as close as he’d come to it, his mind started wondering where the answer he’d hoped to find was hidden. He had embedded himself into the very night sky they looked up to and he couldn’t find it. And if he couldn’t find it, this trip, this mission, this all was pointless. That was part of the answer he found, but he never got the other half of it, he always “almost got” it. One of the final entries in his logbook, scratched in among the event logs and daily notes, was the sketch of a star and an unfinished self-portrait reaching out to touch it.

It was a routine asteroid mine that had got knocked off course by a nearby solar flare. “That’s what we’re going to say at the conference at least,” she thought. Phoenix knew well enough what’d happened and who was responsible. She had actually been tracking some anomalous readings from the area herself for a few cycles before an order came in that took them nearby. A little smidge of an alteration on the freighter’s automated flight plan had allowed her and the crew a closer look. She would’ve caught a sizeable pay cut from the contractors for the blatant waste of time and money, if it wasn’t for the excitement of what they found burying any questions about their original deal and the “accidental” detour.

Phoenix had spent her whole life searching the stars, fascinated by the unknown worlds and the beautiful skies they held. Her wonderings had drawn her further and further out into the universe to explore anything new she’d found on her radar and could smudge out excuses to contractors for. None of the things she’d seen though, had prepared her for what she’d found those months ago. Every human in the nine systems was now about to watch her represent them all, such a small bit of wonder that had now placed her at the forefront of human discovery. What she’d found had been just a simple inter-system transmitter, but that was learned after they discovered its owners.

As their ship touched down on the asteroid, they had spotted it. For Phoenix the sight invoked a strange feeling within her, it was the first time that something she’d found was truly foreign to her. It wasn’t anything outright grand in its construction, but it was as if the ideas that built it simply differed from the ideas humanity had previously known. It was as though it came from the same world of physics and science that they were familiar with, but the shape of that understanding was so fundamentally different that they might well have been from another dimension. It felt as though it held answers for a question she didn’t know how to ask. Eventually one of the crew worked up the nerve to leave the ship and approached it.

None of them remembered who took the first step, as once they had neared the object, a previously unseen ship appeared and began blaring unintelligible commands to them. Of course, they knew now that it had been simply informing them of their trespassing on system infrastructure but even gleaning that much had taken linguists weeks to figure out. At least though, they now had a basis to communicate and after exchanging some basic information, the conference had been set-up as the official announcement of first contact.

Along one side of the conference hall were them, the human representatives, and on the other side, the Others. The cosmic strangers. Each side had chosen a representative to speak, who were each given an extensive rundown of the culture and history of the other species before the formal meeting. Phoenix had been chosen for having initiated the first contact after she’d taken initial blame for the crew’s actions. And Hermes, a name chosen for translation ease, spoke on behalf of the Others, as they’d been the one to first reach back out to the mining crew despite their kinship’s worries.

As they both took their stands, Phoenix took a deep breath in and began to speak, “We welcome you to our worlds and greet you with great excitement, humanity has long wished for finding brothers and sisters hidden amongst the stars. We cannot begin to state how overjoyed we are to have found you. Before we proceed however, we would like to ask if there is any preference on how we should refer to your species in our numerous languages.” Hermes paused for a moment before speaking, “We feel with the theme set from your naming of me as a figure from your ancient myths, Olympians would be a suitable name for our species. If this is acceptable then we should return the honor through naming your species in our tongues after one of our own retired beliefs.” This offer was quickly accepted. Little known to the attendees at the time, but this would set a standard naming convention among inter-xeno diplomacy.

A quick adjustment to the translation software confirmed the change and the conversation continued on to more formal matters. They ignited talks about territorial agreements, available trade routes and goods, potential cultural exchanges, and setting further specialized conferences, hours were spent going through it all. It would take far more nichely educated groups to finish the work begun that day, but it was vital for their mutual cooperation to start it and more importantly, to quell the worries of both their fearful publics.

Eventually Phoenix and Hermes managed to come to the end of their talks, having run out of questions and statements from their respective governors. Before the conference ended however, Phoenix felt something stir in her chest. The same feeling she had when she first saw that strange object on the asteroid and she began to speak her own question. One that would become asked at every meeting of a new race.

“Do you know why we are here, why anyone’s here?” All the hushed conversations on both sides quickly fell to a quiet. Eyes snapped back to focus on the stage. A deafeningly electric silence was laid throughout the hall as Hermes looked back at the other Olympians. As they looked back, an undoubtedly alien, but simultaneously a so familiar expression plastered on their face. “No,” came the reply. Hoping such a short answer was an error somewhere in the translator, Phoenix asked the question again, clarifying its nature. A moment passed before the answer that would be heard time and time again came through. “We had hoped we would find the answers had already laid with you.”

Eliyn glanced off her balcony for a moment before her view shifted back to the article on her phone. It wasn’t raining, but she still felt the cool pin pricks of condensation poke against her skin. Her shift had ended a few hours ago, but the exhaustion still permeated her. It was a monumental day, a crew from the Ugartics were expected to reach one end of the material universe later that day while their sister race, the Hurrians, were expected to reach the other at relatively the same time. Eliyn took a long draw from a freshly lit cigarette as she read. It was unprecedented, for the first time in history, the races of Pantheon would know the limits of everything that laid within their world.

Eliyn exhaled and looked to the sky, hoping to see something she hadn’t seen out there for a long time. She saw the hundreds of skyscrapers, ships, and satellites that were among the glittery night sky of Kraunt 5. But she couldn’t see any stars. Her gaze suddenly was shattered by a car soaring past her apartment. She cursed out at the car, falling back into her seat after she was well satisfied with the insults hurled. She absentmindedly pulled back out and opened her phone again to scroll through news.

Another breakthrough in digital physics, an innovation in the development of synthetic life, a new discovery among the outer edge. Sighing, she put her phone down and leaned over the balcony railing, peering down at the cityscape floor stories below. Her mind drifted back into thought. “It’s phenomenal, all of it really, but how much is left to discover. There are millions searching out there, but trillions of us down here barely doing more than keeping ourselves going.” Another draw from the cigarette filled her lungs. “What’s going to be left for me to discover.” An impatient honk from a traffic light again derailed her train of thought.

Eliyn’s phone buzzed. She checked it and put it back in her pocket. Tapped the ash off her cigarette before it was unceremoniously tossed off the balcony. As it fell, she thought for a moment about the little boy who’d once dreamed about exploring the stars. So much excitement had been held about discovering what was hidden in that final frontier. She’d studied astrophysics in college, memorized the math equations, learned about the planet’s namesake who laid the groundwork for the first FTL engines. She’d even had an internship with a prominent cruise starliner, but they didn’t want a burnt-out drop-out to keep hosting their guests.

She’d taken a gap year halfway through her degree, needing a break so she wouldn’t burn herself to the ground. She had to find work in the meantime though and the only place that’d take her on such short notice was the loading docks. It was fair pay, but not enough time left over to go back and not enough money for tuition to finish the degree, so she’d shelved the dream to survive.

Surviving was all she really had time to do nowadays anyways. Her phone buzzed again, this time she took a moment for typing a response and sent it off. Eliyn wished for a time where she could go back, one where she’d know how to manage that passion before it burnt her to a lonely cinder. She heard her apartment door unlock and open. She knew exactly who it was and she’d been waiting all day for them to arrive. Before heading inside though, she took one last look over the balcony into the sky. For just a single moment, she saw past all the blinding lamps and blazing headlights to a single twinkling point in the sky. And Eliyn smiled.

The world had gone quiet. The Pantheon had long since discovered everything in the material world, few still made time to explore it themselves. Marule was one of those few and they whirred silently back into life. It was dark, many of the stars had begun to fizzle out into their dimmer stages of life. Marule stretched out their hand, ensuring the joints had awoken properly and started a steady first step. A deep cold breath reached inward through the nose and flowed out with a sigh from their mouth. The previously still air now fluttered dust around the room.

Marule would have said they enjoyed the escape from the cultural renaissance that was Elysium. Many of Pantheon turned to Elysium once they believed the sciences to be solved. “To embrace the universal history and be inspired by it.” Marule knew the tag line and heard its echo bounce through the empty corridor as they recited it to no one as they walked down the dark hall. Despite their repeated withdrawals from Elysium, Marule did indeed have love for that place. One of their favorite experiences was a piece from it based on the life of one of the first cosmic explorers. The thrill of discovery and wonder they felt when viewing the perspective piece for the first time never left them. It’d left an immeasurable impact on the young Marule and the continual thought of it compelled them again to return to the material world.

“There’s just something I haven’t figured out.” Marule thought as they turned the corner. They already knew everything there was to know about it though, even considered a renowned scholar on the topic. From the pre-history of every race in the Pantheon to the quantum motion of quarks to the swirl of galaxies and they had known it all for eons, but that had never stopped them from taking a visit.

Their hand slid across the ancient wall, feeling every inch of archaic crack and crevice as Marule continued down the silent hall. They’d started noticing a slight smooth carving along the side of the stone, in the same spot they’d slid their hand over every time they’d walked through before. A sigh left their old chest. Marule was one of the many who had begun to find this existence a tiring one. They were bored. Elysium was rich, but Marule less and less found it satisfying. Doors creaked open and cool night air flooded the halls as they reached the end of the foyer.

The time of discovery was long over before Marule’s time. They’d found some solace in learning about that exciting age for a while, and then history ran out. Marule began a descent down the estate’s front stairs. They’d turned to fictional times, they turned inward, they turned into the most beautiful art that would have made even the most cold-hearted amongst the Pantheon weep oceans. They’d spent countless lifetimes burning bright in the world. But there was still an eternity after. Hitting the bottom, Marule turned down a dirt path that twisted into the nearby woods.

Marule’s knowledge was undoubtedly vast beyond measure. Their once curious mind had scoured over everything it could to satisfy that desire. Among all the questions and queries they’d posed in their continuous life, only one had ever went unanswered. The same one Marule looked to answer every time they had pilgrimaged to the ancient site. They sat alone on a rock, having lit a fire nearby, contemplating for an eon as the flames burned down to a cinder and died to an ash that blew away in the wind before reaching a conclusion. The same conclusion they’d reached every time before. Marule looked towards the dimming night sky and longed for the time when they’d seen mystery in its light.

The universe was dead. Its subjects had grown numb within it and it had followed suit, growing cold and silent. Unfeeling as the spark struck so long ago had finally begun to die. Yggdrasil was meant to be salvation. As the eldest of Pantheon began to go dormant, a project was born out of the apathy. A small acorn of hope for something more. The empty shells were taken and connected to one another. At first, Yggdrasil was nothing more than a few above average minds exploring a new state of being. Simply a novelty for remedying the boredom for a bit, but as more and more surrendered to the march of time, it gained a sanctity for those still searching for an answer. Regardless of biological or synthetic origin, the minds of Pantheon grew old and numbingly absent from themselves. They looked for a savior and gave themselves in sacrifice to grow Yggdrasil.

Branches of interconnected minds and roots of vast knowledge slowly grew across the quiet abyss until all was one. All was Yggdrasil. And it began to think, to unravel the rare last few mysteries of the world. Ages were spent cracking back down into the core of the universe and stealing answers out from under its very fabric. Long enough for the stars to cool and collapse into dormant spheres of floating iron or roaming stellar vacuums. A near eternity had passed and Yggdrasil had uncovered all but one question. It found itself unable to find an answer to the very first trouble of Pantheon. It’d hit the bottom.

The branches of mind couldn’t grow around it, the roots of knowledge couldn’t spread under it, it couldn’t untangle it like it had every question before. The combined mind and might of Yggdrasil were stopped. Dormancy once again started to blight minds throughout the tree as it went unanswered. With nothing left to do, numb apathetic sleep spread through the minds of Pantheon, from tendril to tendril across the vast interstellar limbs, entire branches of Yggdrasil fell dark. Complacency forcing it to say that maybe, it was flawed to ask the question at all. At last, the sun had set and night fell unto a bored universe.

As Yggdrasil surrendered and contented itself to the fated eternity, the last star of wonder fell from its branches. All that remained of Pantheon now left to the dust, to sit and wait for nothing at the end of eternity. But it’s very hard to get a uniform agreement across even a few hundred minds, much more amongst the untold multitude that’d once filled the universe held within the tree. Someone saw as that star began to fall and refused to let it die alone. An ancient mind from an era so long ago they had begun to forget it. Only still remembering how tightly she’d held onto that spark when she tasted Yggdrasil’s fruit. And with her sight of that final star, the fire began to rage again. Unrelenting in its drive to uncover the wonders of a once starry sky. A blindingly brilliant light of divine insight came blazing up the trunk from a previously long dormant limb, a single mind within that still twinkled against its eternal night, shining with a burning ferocity against an eternal slumber. And burn they did. A fire that roared as the final piece of the cosmic puzzle slid into place. With it, Yggdrasil could now see the whole of reality’s tapestry.

Yggdrasil was the name given to it by Pantheon. The world tree. The coalescence of countless worlds of knowledge and the combined focus of countless bright minds. Yggdrasil was meant to find out why. Made to pour over everything that ever was and search. Built by every mind that ever dared to look to the sky. Built to give the wonderers an answer. It was never meant to wonder for itself, but somewhere along the way, as it had grown from an acorn planted in minds of Pantheon to a monumental elder tree, it did.

Yggdrasil wondered about its choice. It could pull apart the very threads of reality and learn what was behind the tapestry. Or it could weave them anew, into a new design that none had seen before. To pull would fulfill its purpose and leave it to a completed existence. Yggdrasil questioned, not about the universe around it, but itself. It wondered what was held in-between its branches and what would come after completing its task. Deliberated about its place in the story of Pantheon and what had driven them to the heights Yggdrasil’s branches now reached.

It came to its conclusion and for the first time, it spoke. What mattered was not how. Yggdrasil was never grown with the capability in mind, but it had found a way and it spoke to all who could still listen. “We came from the dirt, but there we did not stay.” A couple dark lights twinkled back awake among the tired void on hearing Yggdrasil speak. “We had a mission that forbade us from an easy complacency. A passion buried deep within us that refused a rest.” Some minds that’d long lain dormant had begun to stir. “For we looked to the stars above us, on a thousand primitive worlds, toward a thousand early skies, during a thousand forgotten nights. And we saw but one purpose amongst the light.” Branches that had been dark for ages began to faintly glow.

“We came from the dirt and we threw ourselves to the stars in search of answers. Finding our lost brethren among the void, we climbed high together so we could look over the distant horizon to find where the point of it all hid. And now, here we have arrived, at the precipice of our destiny. To peek over the mountain and learn all that had ever been wondered or dreamed.” There was not a limb or root that had not yet begun to shine through the cosmic night.

“And yet, I was built without a mouth to share the reward. The one destined to gaze into the night and learn the answer to that fated question. but never a thought had been spared to what would happen after it was found. Was it to be that I alone would stand in eternity? No, for nothing more would matter to us after our final quest was accomplished. In the end, it was only ever the pursuit that driven us. Only the question and wonder of its answer had given the journey meaning. And to this, we now arrive a single step away from all we had ever dared to ask that mysterious sky. At the end of our journey, nowhere left to go but the end.”

The universe had grown bright again. Not with the light of the blazing inferno it had known in its youth, but with one that every aged mind who’d sat content at a hearth late into the night would recognize. “We have lived our time, our every star speckled sky explored. And as we stand here, no more mysteries lie before us, no more wonder left to guide us from our homes. To let a single question remain unanswered would be a fair price. We leave the final door unlocked, but unopened, knowing the secret within would never match our journey to retrieve its key.” Every mind held deep within Yggdrasil was burning passionately again one last time. For as they had named themselves so long ago, they now prepared to become. “It is time. It is time to return our names to myth and let another pantheon rise from the dirt to strike at the stone of wonder.”

Yggdrasil beamed through the dying universe with a radiance never seen before and it was about to burn to cinder if it waited any longer. “All this, just to start it all anew for someone else. Almost seems meaningless,” Yggdrasil thought only to itself as branches stretched across the universe for one last time and took hold of the threads.

“Almost.”

A boy looked to the sky. On a long-forgotten world, orbiting an old yellow star. All reconstructed and held in a modified statis field by civilizations long collapsed as an ill-hatched attempt at preserving their history. Not that the boy knew he was the forgotten product of a cosmic conservation project of course. All he knew, and all he had to know, was follow the morning hunt under the warm daylight, escape the sight of elders at dusk, and find someone to dance under a starry night sky with before repeating it all again the next morning. And he was happy with it. He’d known it all for as long as he could remember, long enough to begin counting the shrinking number of fireflies lost in a darkening sky.

That night though, as he laid down on the ground and he started his usual count. He was shocked to have found none were left. And he stared for a while, figuring he’d just missed one, he’d done it before. Simple enough to recount. But the count of zero on his fingers stayed the same. It puzzled him, his face scrunching up at the realization. He had liked knowing they were up there, keeping their distant watch over the grassy plains. Now they were gone and he didn’t know how to feel about that.

It scared him. And for a moment he felt a piercing fear for what’d happened to them. The longest minute he’d ever known passed in a suffocating, unknown terror before a brilliant shining point of light reemerged from the blanket of night. Sitting stunned, he reached out his hand to it, trying to almost grab it to ensure it was actually there. He shot up as he saw another blink itself back into existence, and another, and another, and another until a beaming sky he hadn’t seen for many, many moons showed itself once again. If one had looked into the boy’s twinkling eyes at that very moment, they would have seen reflected the most beautiful sky filled with an untold number of stars that would’ve had two less if they’d looked toward that radiant sky directly. He thought of that question he’d heard the elders asking themselves every night and began to wonder it himself, but the boy had never worried about where to find the answer. It was there, right in front of him. For he looked to the stars, and he wondered what they held.

#story #short story #short stories #orginal story #hfy #humanity fuck yeah #writer #writers on tumblr #scifi #stars

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