From the void between what was and what remains, I watched the ship emerge—its hull whole but weathered by distance, its engines whispering the quiet language of stars that had burned too long. The Aetherion slipped from the timestream like a memory finding its way home, light trailing from her flanks in threads of gold and green.
She was not broken—only changed.
Her temporal core pulsed unsteadily, mended but never whole, a wound that still remembered its fracture. Yet she endured, as she always had, bound to the will of the one who refused to let her die.
Below her lay Edson.
Once radiant, now silent. A world that had burned itself into myth.
The Aetherion entered orbit with care, her scanners sweeping across a wounded world still warm from its dying breath. The fires had burned out, but their ghosts lingered—columns of smoke twisting faintly where oceans once shimmered. The great cities were no more than collapsed spires and molten glass, their foundations cracked open like bones split for marrow.
No pulse. No movement. Only the echo of what had been—streets buried in ash, rivers choked to silence, fields turned to scorched mirrors beneath the fading sun.
The world had not aged—it had ended.
And the ending was recent enough to still remember its own pain.
Still, the ship circled—searching, unwilling to believe. For what is a vessel without purpose but another ghost adrift in eternity? And as she passed through the light of Aethera and its fading companion, Nyros—I felt it:
a signature, faint but unyielding, buried deep beneath the ruin.
A name that refused to die.
Vear.
Even the silence remembers him.