Two moons hang low in the sky — one pale blue, the other rose-colored.
Wind drifts gently through tall, iridescent grasses, creating ripples like a slow ocean.
Arthur kneels beside a floating drone, tools arranged in neat rows.
Sarah sits nearby, sketchbook open, pencil whispering across paper.
Every so often she glances up, memorizing the way he looks in the gentle morning light.
The world is alien — silver-barked trees, salt-sweet air, flowers that glow faintly —
but somehow, it feels like home.
---
Their house grows slowly, piece by piece.
Alien wood. Salvaged solar tiles.
Arthur measures everything twice; Sarah insists on windows where light might “feel kind.”
A roof panel slips once. Arthur catches it mid-fall.
Sarah laughs breathlessly.
“Perfect timing.”
Arthur grins.
“Decades of practice.”
At night they sit by the hearth.
Sometimes Arthur wakes trembling from too many memories.
He never explains — Sarah understands.
She pulls him close until the shaking fades.
Her tears are quiet — not sadness, but love.
---
Arthur collapses one morning.
His fever burns mercilessly.
He shivers violently, then burns hotter.
The sheets are soaked.
He vomits until only pain remains.
Sarah holds him through every breath.
Every spasm.
Every begged whisper.
The colony doctor can only shake his head.
“He must survive it himself.”
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Nights become a blur of terror and hope.
Then —
the fever breaks.
Arthur opens his eyes, alive.
Sarah sobs with relief — knowing finally, painfully, that she could lose him.
---
Sarah teaches children beneath alien skies, her belly round with new life.
She draws constellations in chalk — stories from Earth rewritten in starlight.
Arthur watches from the workshop window, smiling with a quiet he once believed impossible.
---
One evening, Arthur talks with Varhee on the porch.
Sarah approaches, books tucked under her arm.
Her smile blooms when she sees Varhee.
They embrace — their first meeting in the flesh.
Moments later, they are laughing together like old friends.
Arthur watches from the steps, stunned and warmed.
---
Their son grows tall and determined.
Arthur shows him how to fix solar tiles.
Sarah watches from the garden, proud.
Years later, under silver-leafed trees, Arthur officiates his son’s wedding.
Sarah wipes her tears, smiling through the whole ceremony.
---
Forty years of patience, sunlight, and careful engineering —
and at last, Arthur holds a ripe strawberry in his palm.
Small. Perfectly imperfect.
He places it in Sarah’s hand.
She bites into it and laughs, bright with joy.
“Worth the wait.”
---
They grow gray.
They dance beneath twin moons.
Their granddaughter plays Sarah’s violin piece in the yard —
the one born in the White Void.
Children laugh.
The house glows warm against the dusk.
Arthur and Sarah sit on the porch swing, wrapped in a blanket.
Her head rests on his shoulder.
Their fingers intertwine — thin, warm, steady.
The air smells faintly of strawberries.
Arthur closes his eyes.
Sarah whispers something only he hears.
Above them, stars shimmer.
Two moons rise.
And for the first time in all of history,
the weight of time finally lifts.
One life together.
The end.
(The year is 25,290.)
Epilogue
(The year is 2248)
On Earth, an eon ago, Arthur sits at a harvest-festival campfire, singing beneath drifting autumn lanterns.
Hundreds of miles away, across the plains of the Second Civilization, silence breaks with a deep, mechanical sigh —
the hiss of old hydraulics engaging.
The ground shifts. Rises. Falls.
An ancient alarm wails once, distorted by time, then dies.
From the opening in the earth, a man crawls out.
Dried blood streaks his hands — his face — the ruins of his shirt.
He stands at the edge of the pit, blinking into a world he has not yet learned to fear.
Inside the buried chamber — the remains of another life:
Two older women slumped at a table, skulls broken by a silver candelabrum.
Farther in, a man in his thirties lies strangled with a blood-stained sheet.
Beyond them, in a small orchard, a man and woman lie stabbed beneath the twisted roots of a fruit tree.
Death. Destruction. Cruelty on display.
A museum of malice.
---
The same man wears a suit now.
A yellow band encircles his arm.
He shouts into a microphone, demanding votes from a crowd that doesn’t know him — not really.
He sits among thieves and murderers.
A prisoner is dragged before them, screaming.
The man does not look away.
Not even when the screaming stops.
---
He sits at a boardroom table next. Calm. Clean. Precise.
Executives speak of colonists, resources, profit margins.
A thousand human lives weighed against a planet’s soil density.
He laughs.
---
Later, he stands beside eight colossal crates.
Inside each one: an incinerated Allui body.
A young soldier trembles beneath his stare.
The man smiles thinly.
“Do it.”
The soldier hesitates… then obeys —
ejecting the bodies into space like garbage.
---
He sits at the bones of Linthera.
Its great skeleton rots in silence.
The Allui — bright, harmonic, ancient — gone.
He hums softly to himself.
“I guess your gods didn’t save you after all.”
From the dust, he lifts a fragment of bone: a length of fused spinal machinery.
He turns it in the dim light like a sacred artifact.
Deeper inside Linthera, he finds a cracked coin drive.
He studies it, frowning.
“How did you get here, old friend?”
He slips it into his pocket, a sly smile curving across his face.
“What should we take, Mister Daevos?” another man asks.
He looks up into the hollowed chamber.
“Take everything.”
Uniformed workers flood the space, ripping it bare —
tools carving apart sacred architecture without hesitation.
---
To his left, an Allui–animal hybrid crouches in a cage.
A readout bolted to its skull flickers —
first in Allui glyphs…
then in human text:
DNA FILES ON HAND.
MEMORY BRAIN SCANS.
Daevos taps the bars with his boot.
The creature recoils, shuddering.
He smiles.
“This could be interesting.”
---
The end.
(The year is 26,385.)
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