Archive of Our Own ^beta

ONE: IDENTIFY 

Even now, the Prisoner is grateful for his family's mercy. 

In the universe—the one he knows is real, not this echo they've built out of green fire and fear—his punishment was far more fitting for an owlk stripped of his name in betrayal. A cage so small the ceiling brushed his remaining antler and his claws scraped the metal walls would be a horrible place to die. 

A cage with three levels, a window to see the sky, and a few most beloved objects of a lifetime he'd thrown away is a gift. This he tells himself. Years trickle by into centuries which pass into millennia and he tells himself this, even as he feels his mind bleeding out onto the walls of this place. His prison was made comfortable but it is far from kind. He is alone.

Not forever , he tells himself throughout the empty years. He turns the projector over in his dirty claws and watches the flame smear eerie green on the silver metal. Though he has long since given up hope that someone, by some cosmic miracle, might have been listening at just the right instant to hear the sacrifice he made, he still wonders if the Eye of the Universe might find them even here. They have turned away from its gaze, but surely it hasn't turned away from them?

He doesn't want to be alone here. 

That flame could go out. So easily, he could blow it and himself into non-existence. Many days, he almost does. But he deserves—

He doesn't know what he deserves. He had given everything in the hope to understand what the song of the universe was saying. He had lost it all in service to a question. Does he really want to die before he knows the answer? 

The owlks made their story a tragedy. The Prisoner wants to be more than that. 

But he is in a cage, and hope only lives so long before it dies between the bars. 

***

When it happens, he hides. 

Much later, he'll laugh at himself for it—amusement and self-hatred a toxic mess in his broken chest. He hears the great door that seals his punishment open. He hears the scrape of stone and the thud of nervous footsteps. After countless years these sounds terrify him. 

He does not think it might be his family come to release him, to forgive him. Perhaps they are here to kill him, or to ask questions of him. He hides, leaving the projector behind in his haste, and hopes to overhear their wishes or their movements. 

But it is not one of his kin that steps into his seclusion for the first time. Of course it isn't—they have all but erased him from their history. Instead, the footsteps on the upper level of the prison wander into his view, and the Prisoner has to look down. Down at a creature the color of dusk, with four eyes dark with an emotion the Prisoner recognizes very well indeed. 

The creature wears ratty clothes fashioned of torn pieces of owlk garments, stitched together for their thin body. Their hand, with too few fingers and no claws, is wrapped around a projector that looks comically bulky in their grip. No feathers brush their skin—no scales, either. They look more like the aguergats on the Prisoner's homeworld than an owlk. 

They stop in the center of the room, looking around themselves. A sound leaves their mouth.  It's a sort of chattering croak, utterly unrecognizable. The creature rubs a stocky palm across their face. 

The Prisoner takes a step forward. It's hesitant, as the darkness that had cloaked his shoulders peels away. His claws curl around the handle of his projector, and he calls out as the creature turns. 

"Who are you?" he almost cries. 

The creature's eyes go wide. They throw themselves back, and for a terrible moment, the Prisoner thinks they are going to flee—to run back into the clanking elevator and leave him alone again. But they look back at him, standing with a claw outstretched, too terrified to pursue them and too curious to turn away, and they pause. 

Slowly, the creature cocks their head. They approach him cautiously, leaving their projector behind. They must understand this place quite well. It would be more difficult for the Prisoner to kill them than to extinguish their flame, and they're counting on it.

Clever, he thinks. This is the first assumption he makes of this creature he will come to know as well as he knows himself. 

The creature approaches him. Boldly, stupidly, they stand within his reach. Their face is open with a sadness, a guilt, a horror—but it takes the Prisoner a moment to decode it beneath their wonderment. 

They chitter something at him. The Prisoner can only cock his asymmetric head. His feathers puff around his neck. 

How did you get here? He wants to screech. What are you? Do you know me? 

Do you know what happened to the universe? 

They won't understand. They can't hear him, not like this—but they have enough eyes that maybe they can see. The creature takes a step back as the Prisoner steps forward. He raises his projector to illuminate the room, warm light tossing his shadow on the round wood walls, and steps carefully to the side. He doesn't want to spook the little creature. 

They watch him with interest as he moves, though. And when he lifts the vision torch propped on the side of the room, they move almost eagerly into the light. They must recognize this, too. Or perhaps they are simply very reckless for answers. 

Later, the Prisoner will know it is both. Now, he only watches as his memory dances on the lenses of those eyes. 

His plan had been one of passion. A spur of the moment awakening from his slumber in the owlk homedream. The Prisoner had been playing his therallo softly, listening to his friend Cicado talk about the stars. Cicado was an elder owlk, and she knew much about their homeworld and their history. She'd snapped at him to stop playing when he'd begun a piece he'd started composing two days before. It was a song lifted from his dreams of the Eye, of the hymns and prayers they'd sing to it in the shrines. 

"How dare you," she'd said.

"Take care you do not go too far," she'd said. 

He'd thought he was alone then—before he'd known what real loneliness could be like. He was the only one who thought what they'd done to silence the Eye was wrong. The only one to resist entering the homedream. The only one to travel so often between its locations, restless in a world that had been programmed to be perfect. 

What right had they to determine the destiny of a universe they no longer lived in? He could not understand it. Could not make himself believe that whatever was calling from the stars would cause the demise of the owlks when they all seemed perfectly capable of doing it themselves. 

He tells the strange creature this, now, in a patchy network of images of his crime. He'd woken. The control panel for the signal blocker probe was easy to unlock, easy to turn off. He'd closed his eyes as though to listen to the music, praying that somewhere someone braver was doing the same, and in the darkness behind his eyes, his family had found him. 

He does not show the little alien what it was like. One day he will, but now he turns away from the memory of sharp claws and shrieks of betrayal and shows the vault closing in front of his aching, name-stripped form. He shows what he's sure followed; the others silencing the Eye once again. 

He wonders, as the torch lowers from his eyes, if the Eye has been as lonely as him. 

He's breathing hard, he realizes. The creature stands in front of him, wide-eyed and stricken. He wonders how long they'd been looking for this answer, this final piece of the owlk's tragic puzzle.

The Prisoner wants to understand. Needs to understand. He extends the vision torch to the creature in a trembling claw, a plea and an order. 

The creature looks at it. Looks at him. 

Then they sink to their knees and sob.

***

Gypsum has spent the vast majority of their life feeling like a fucking idiot. 

It's sort of the Hearthian bread and butter, and the reason they've always pushed on through every mistake they've made. Everyone's an idiot sometimes. Everyone crashes their spaceship and burns down half the village. Everyone asks Slate to explain autopilot mapping and gets berated for expecting the impossible. And maybe not everyone flies their ship into the mouth of an anglerfish in Dark Bramble, or gets themselves crushed by sand because they tried to fuck around in the Sunless City a bit too late, but everyone knows what it's like to try again. Oh well, that was dumb of me, maybe I'll be less dumb next time. 

Gypsum has fixed quite a lot of mistakes in their life. But standing before this Stranger with its empty, desperate eyes, they don't think they can fix this one.

“Listen,” they hiccup through tears. Stars, how long has it been since they cried? “In my defense, I’m usually smarter than this.”

A lie. Gossan would laugh at them if they were here. But Gossan’s not here. Gossan’s dead, along with everyone else Gypsum has ever known, hundreds of times over. Gypsum had a nightmare about them last night—involving a fuel tank, twelve chunks of ore, and all four eyes.

It sucks that you can apparently dream inside this living dream. That shouldn’t be allowed, if you ask Gypsum. But nobody should ever ask Gypsum anything, apparently. Exhibit A: there’s a Stranger looking down at them in what’s probably abject confusion, because Gypsum’s thoroughly and completely ruined the entire universe.

Ruining the universe is quite a step up from ruining your reactor core, they think hysterically. Feldspar would be proud. 

But Feldspar’s dead. Gossan’s dead, Slate’s dead, Hal’s dead. Hell, even Gabbro’s dead now, because Gypsum thought they were being clever when they were only being a coward. 

 “Don’t judge me,” Gypsum mutters, wiping their face on their sleeve. Their underflight suit got torn to pieces in the first year or so they spent here. But most bits of cloth programmed into the Stranger’s simulation are real enough that one can darn them together in a horrible mismatch that would make Gneiss roll in their sun-vaporized grave. Gypsum thinks it’s actually pretty comfortable. 

The Stranger makes a keening sound and holds that weird vision-stick thing further toward them. Gypsum winces despite themself. They’ve been here long enough that the Strangers don’t even bother to chase them anymore, but that sound still sends a bolt of adrenaline through their spine like nothing else but an angler’s scream really can. Why do all aliens always gotta sound so eerie? 

Well, except for Solanum. Stars, she’d be so disappointed in them. 

“I’m sorry, okay?” Gypsum snaps at the beast. “I didn’t mean to—I thought this was the best outcome. I thought I could live and maybe even find a way to bring my friends back to life here. You guys are all about brain waves—I augmented up my signal scope with your weird green tech and stored everyone I knew. But that didn’t work because I’m not allowed to bring Slate’s tech into a dream, apparently. So then I thought, maybe you could pull them from my memories? If we had enough time to make it happen. So I… made a choice. I just didn’t want to fucking die, okay? Stars, don’t judge me!”

The poor, dead, memory-beast that’s been trapped inside this box for who-knows-how-long makes a frustrated sound. It doesn’t understand shit that Gypsum’s saying. Which is probably good, because if it knew that Gypsum had been given the chance to honor its sacrifice and had squandered it, it’d probably snap their neck. 

They swallow, hard. Tears squeeze themselves down their face, and it feels like that time—twenty loops in? Thirty?—that they’d lost it in front of Slate. They’d just died beside Pye’s corpse in the heart of the Interloper and… yeah. It got to them a little. 

Slate’s so bad at comforting people. They’d awkwardly handed Gypsum a marshmallow and told them ‘uh, I could make more tweaks to the ship engine. If that’d make you feel safer’. And Gypsum had cried even more, because there would be no universe where they’d ever, ever get to be safe again. 

Gypsum’s terrible at comforting people, too. Exhibit A, Chert. Exhibit B, Solanum. Exhibit C, this sad, dead Stranger who’s been living and dying alone for a million years because it had released the signal of the Eye back into the universe. The signal the Nomai had followed. The signal they’d built their Ash Twin Project to discover. The signal that’s the only reason Gypsum’s even alive right now. 

This Stranger had sacrificed everything so the secrets of the Eye of the Universe could be found. And Gypsum had wasted it. 

They almost start crying in earnest again, but manage to swallow another pathetic little round of tears before they embarrass themselves more. Drying their face, they get to their feet. The vision-stick is still in the Stranger’s hand. Gypsum still doesn’t want to die, so when they take it and lift it to their face, the story they tell is one of hope. Stars, this poor creature probably needs it. 

Gypsum tells the Stranger about time. About the bones in the cloaked ship, and about their success. Of the way someone was listening to the Eye’s signal, someone came for it. Gypsum describes, in broken images, the Nomai escape pods and their language and their cities that turned to ruins, and their ruins that became inspiration for Hearthians a thousand years later. 

They’re crying again, by the end of it. Crying, because what else is there to do? They used to believe the universe was so enormous, and so beautiful. 

The Stranger cries too. It’s a sound Gypsum last heard when the Strangers of the cliffside village learned how many of their fellows died when the dam burst. This sound is touched with relief, though. With decisiveness. Gypsum can only imagine what it’s like—to realize what you died for was what brought the being before you to life in the first place. 

Gypsum owes this creature so much. 

They’re still standing there, overwhelmed, when the Stranger moves away. Shoulders hung low in determination, artifact in hand, the beast strides for the elevator to the upper floors. It turns, once, and Gypsum gives it the vision-stick a bit dazedly. Instead of ‘speaking’, though, it bows once and turns into the elevator. Bows—to Gypsum, who’s ruined everything. As though it’s grateful. Guilt freezes them in place for a moment too long, and they only shake themself out of their reverie when they hear footsteps on the upper floor. It would be very easy for the Stranger to lock Gypsum in here in its place. 

So they follow, picking up speed as they vault up the steps to the vault entrance. It’s still open—thank the stars. But the relief doesn’t last long. 

The Stranger is walking into the water. 

And Gypsum knows terror very well. Gypsum has lived a life of it, hundreds of looped lives, and they have died to it and woken with it clogging their throat. This feeling that spikes in them, a desperation they didn’t know themselves capable of, is more than terror. 

They throw their artifact aside, uncaring of the flame that holds their life, and hurl themselves forward. One hand wraps tight in the Stranger’s robe, the other grabbing its wrist to keep its own artifact above the damning lake surface. Gypsum is not strong, but they are surprising. And they are loud. 

“Don’t!” they almost shriek. Don’t, because even though you deserve peace, I have not found it. Don’t, because there’s still so much you don’t know. Don’t, because I lied. 

Don’t, because I don’t want to be alone here anymore. 

The Stranger pauses. Looks at them with those white eyes, its mouth half-open as if in question. The vision-stick is propped against a nearby rock. Wrenching the beast’s artifact from its hands, Gypsum stumbles back onto safe earth and reach for it. The vision they send is clumsy and hurried and ugly. 

A green fireplace, surrounded by skeletons. Another body, decaying on the wood before it. In one hand is clenched an artifact. In the other, a Nomai warp core. A little hut, built in the woods of the river lowlands, lonely. Gypsum, trying to speak to Strangers. Gypsum, fleeing Strangers. Ladders constructed of broken vines to reach pristine slide reels. Years and years of dreaming and never waking up. 

Gypsum’s hands curl into fists. The words taste heavy and pitiful on their tongue, and they will mean nothing, but they force them out all the same. “I need your help.”

And the Stranger, with nothing to live for, steps back out of the water. 

Expanding the walls of his cage is better than the Prisoner thought it would be.

Seeing the sky, even just a simulation of it, is like a wish come true. Running his claws through river mud and feeling wet vines on his feathers is a breath of life he’d long since forgotten. It’s incredible, this place—a true honor to the home the owlks lost. And for the first time in a million years, there is someone to hear the Prisoner when he breathes. There is someone whose breath the Prisoner can hear. 

The creature shows him how to climb from the vault keys to the secret archives his family built to hide the history they deemed too painful, too dangerous, to be known. From there, they ascend into the world above. They walk every inch of it they can. Follow every path they can safely reach without risking the flames of their projectors. It takes days. 

The vision torch quickly wares out its welcome. The Prisoner struggles to tailor his memories to ones that don’t reveal too much to the little alien. And the alien seems frustrated with how cumbersome and slow the communication is. They chatter at him often. 

Once, holed up in the small hut the creature created for themself, the creature slams their palms onto their knees and howls at him. Surprised, the Prisoner flinches back. The alien’s face drops into a bit of a smile.

They howl again. Differently. It’s almost like—

“We don’t sound anything like that,” the Prisoner says. Their voice echoes around the little building. 

The alien scrunches their four eyes together and tries to replicate the sound. It’s unrecognizable. But the Prisoner has begun to understand the meaning of that look in the alien’s eyes. It’s the look they wear when pulling the Prisoner off a boat into pitch darkness in the passageways between parts of the dreamworld. It’s the look they shoot him when he tries to take the vision torch from their hands before they break it with their tinkering. 

The Prisoner prefers not to get in the way of that look. 

“Hello,” he says, clearly and directly. 

“Melrgh,” says the alien. It’s almost a word. 

But it’s a voice, a voice that’s trying to reach him. The Prisoner has not heard anyone speak to him in so long he’s forgotten what it’s like, forgotten what anything but his own bugles sound like echoing off claustrophobic walls. 

He lost his mind in that vault, he’s sure, when he feels himself smile. 

The alien points at him, chittering something triumphant. Leaning back against the tree root at his side, the Prisoner forces his fangs together and chitters back. 

The creature’s eyes widen. The look returns in earnest, as they leap to their feet and reach for the vision torch. Unsure what to expect, the Prisoner ducks his head to look into the green light. It’s a short vision. Just images of … many similar-looking aliens greeting each other. 

The alien chitters something to accompany it. Carefully, the Prisoner attempts to replicate the sound. Perhaps it is a greeting? A hello, as he had tried to communicate earlier?

When the creature seems satisfied that he understands, they drop the torch to their side and point at themselves. They make a sound. “Gypsum.”

The Prisoner cocks his head. The alien repeats themself, jabbing at their chest more excitedly. They make the sound again. The word—no. More than a word.

“Gypsum,” the Prisoner says, rising to his feet as he understands. 

The name.

Gypsum grins, and the Prisoner wonders if he's going to die. If this tightness in his chest is going to kill him. He is not made for understanding, for satisfaction—he is an owlk, who forfeited their right to know, who buried themselves in regret and ignorance. He does not deserve this. Will it destroy him? 

He does not have a name to give Gypsum in return. But he does have a smile. They sit in the hut, crowing Gypsum and hello at each other like they are nothing more than fawns again, and for a moment, it feels like the universe is still out there, somewhere. 

Waiting for them. 

***

To Gypsum’s best estimate, it’s a month after they break the Stranger out of the vault that it finally decides to try and get them killed. 

“Gypsum,” the Stranger says in their moaning, quantum-fluctuations voice one morning after Gypsum is trying to fall back asleep after a particularly harrowing nightmare. This one involved Chert blaming them for the realization that the universe was dying—they’d pushed Gypsum off the plateau of their camp, and they’d fallen down and down toward the lost lakebed cave and layed there, paralyzed. In the dream, a Nomai they’d been certain was Coleus had choked to death on ghost matter all while looking them in the eyes. 

“What do you want,” Gypsum mutters, pulling their ragged blanket over their head. 

“Go,” says the Stranger. It’s not very good at picking up words and grammar—not like Hal—but it’s better at forming the words of the Hearthian language than Gypsum is at speaking stranger. Communication is slow-going and extremely frustrating. They haven’t even figured out the creature’s name. But Gypsum can’t exactly blame the Stranger. After all, who’s it had to talk to in thousands of years? Anyone would be a little socially awkward, even without the language barrier. 

“No,” Gypsum moans. They know the Stranger understands that, at least. 

The Stranger howls something. There’s the sound of heavy footsteps, and then Gypsum finds themself jabbed with the business end of the vision torch. 

Giving up, Gypsum sits up and lets themself be explained to. Apparently, the Stranger thinks Gypsum is cold, probably because the last of their skin has decayed in the real world. It moves on past this absolutely horrible thought while Gypsum is still caught up picturing it and grimacing, and has to repeat its vision. Apparently, there’s a house in the simulation that belongs to the Stranger. They have blankets there. 

Gypsum is pretty certain they would’ve found it already, but they don’t protest. They’d love a blanket. They’d really love to stop thinking about the fact that this kind Stranger had a home here before they were put in solitary confinement. Did they have friends, too? A family? Had any of them been lucky enough to enter the simulation in the ritual room in the cliffside village?

The ‘don’t protest’ rule gets broken at about the same time Gypsum realizes where the Stranger is steering the raft. The familiar dock of the starlit cove looms from the darkness, and Gypsum yelps. 

“Bad idea! There’s like, half the remaining Strangers living here. And an alarm—which can’t wake us up, but can damn still alert them to our presence! Are you trying to get us blown out?” 

The Stranger, who probably understood about one in ten of those words, cocks their head at Gypsum. Frustratedly, Gypsum reaches for the vision torch—but the Stranger steps out onto the dock before they can try and communicate anything. It refuses to look even after they climb the stairs and cross the bridge to the cove proper. Very pointedly. 

Bastard. If there’s one thing Gypsum hates as much as ruining the entire universe and knowing everyone they love is dead, it’s being ignored. 

“You’re the worst,” Gypsum hisses through gritted teeth. “Gossan would fucking strangle you right now, you know that? I’d strangle you right now, if I could reach your stupid neck.”

Practice has made Gypsum near silent on the wooden slats of the dream structures, and they wince every time the Stranger’s heavy footfalls reverberate through the space. But their footsteps aren’t the only ones. They both freeze, tensing, when they hear the creak of another Stranger passing above them. 

The Stranger glances at Gypsum. Gypsum glares. “See what I mean?” they hiss. 

“Danger,” the Stranger says. “Go?” 

“No fucking shit it’s dangerous!” Gypsum whisper-shouts, but allows the Stranger to guide them through extinguished doors all the same. They weave carefully through buildings and creep over bridges, until a spindly shape looms out of the dark. Gypsum almost jumps out of their skin. Then they realize it’s the familiar shape of a transport hand, and sigh. 

“Come on,” they say. “It’s a dead end, here, we’ll have to turn around.”

But the Stranger is busy fiddling with something in the mechanism. Cocking their head, Gypsum watches it trace the pattern they’ve never been able to reach with ease. Then, artifact in hand, it focuses the light—and suddenly disappears. 

Perhaps Gypsum should be afraid, but it’s delight that breaks across their face instead. A secret! It’s been eons since they found out anything new about this place. They lift their own artifact, and find themselves moving with the familiar stomach-swooping distortion of the hand. Instead of being pulled, they’re being pushed to the other side of the bridge.

The Stranger steadies them with a cold, scaly hand. It coos something, and Gypsum turns with a grin in reply. 

“That was awesome!” they say. “I didn’t know it could do—”

A sound comes from the darkness. 

Instantly, the Stranger conceals their flame. Gypsum has already done so, the movement a muscle memory deeper than flying their ship or navigating with their jetpack ever was—which saddens them, when they ever have the chance to think of it. A green light is creeping toward them. Slowly, undeniably, across the bridge. 

They’re exposed, Gypsum realizes. And the hand—it’s facing the wrong way, now. 

Around their arm, the Stranger’s grip tightens. It pushes Gypsum forward, then sharply left, crowding Gypsum into the frame of an elevator. Their back strikes the fresco lenses of the button system. It’s too risky to activate. The light and the sound would give away everything. 

That green light is close now. Close enough that it reflects off round eyes, illuminates tasseled clothes. The shadows cut blades of branched antlers. 

Gypsum doesn’t breathe. They listen to the bridge planks creak. The Stranger has put them in the shadow of its own hulking form, and they can feel feathers on their skin. They can feel them trembling. As the light gets closer, Gypsum can see those mirrored eyes darting sideways toward the water beyond the railings. 

Oh. Gypsum might die, if that approaching light notices them, but maybe not. They know this creature—it’s one of the ones that stalked the well, and used to try and chase Gypsum away whenever they emerged from the archive. Now, though, it’s almost too much effort for either of them. 

So yes, Gypsum may feel themselves blown out of existence here. And the Stranger, this Stranger, who was punished so harshly for so long by its own kind… would it be locked away again? Sent back to that lonely room and the broken telescope, for another eternity? 

Gypsum understands why the creature stares at the water and not at the approaching light. They would take an extinguished flame over more loneliness if they had to, too. 

Reaching out, Gypsum presses a hand to the Stranger’s shoulder. Its feathers are soft. Gypsum doesn’t know what else to do but squeeze softly, like they might when Marl watched the Attlerock and pretended like they weren’t thinking of Esker. 

The Stranger stiffens for a moment. Then, slowly, with each step that green light takes toward and then past the elevator cubby, it relaxes. 

Gypsum hears the other Stranger grumble in what must be annoyance about the hand, before it turns and moves past again. Only when it’s disappeared back into the cove structures do Gypsum and the Stranger creep back onto the bridge. 

They’re quiet for a long moment. Then Gypsum smiles a shaky smile and snorts, “now do you get why I said this was a bad idea?”

***

 The Prisoner's home is nothing but a pile of burned wood. 

He steps off the raft onto the once-sturdy floor, mostly because there's nowhere else to go. He's not surprised. Not really. The dazed nothing that rings in his ears just makes him all the more aware that the soot under his claws is sticky and rough, and his feathers are still ruffled from where Gypsum had grabbed him. 

The little alien stands behind him in the remains of the house. For once, they are quiet, and for once, the Prisoner wishes they would speak. That they would act, for just a moment, as though he is real, as though he hadn't faded to nothing in that vault, as though everything he is hasn't been reduced to ash. 

The remains of his home smell like dust and emptiness, forgotten for millenia. They're ruins, lost history like the Nomai that Gypsum had told him of. Is he ruined? His family that had loved and killed him had burned this place like they burned the Eye shrines, and it's poetic in a way that makes him want to tear his feathers out. 

He steps forward. Opens one of the cases where he'd kept the portrait of his mother Aniso and his father Ixodida. It's burned to nothing, unrecognizable. The blankets he'd promised Gypsum have crumbled to dust. 

When the ringing in the Prisoner's ears is almost loud enough that he can hear the vault closing, Gypsum speaks. He doesn't understand what they say, but he catches a few words. "This" and "wrong" and "others." 

When he meets their eyes, they scowl. Not at him—he knows this about them; that Gypsum finds the universe distinctly irritating sometimes. Something will happen, and Gypsum will fail to understand why, and then proceed to take it personally. 

“Sorry,” Gypsum says, and in the string of words that follow, it’s all the Prisoner needs to understand. 

He wants to say it’s alright—that he deserves this, that he doesn’t blame anyone for it. It’s not as though this place is real, anyway. But he lacks the words, and he doesn’t know what images to project. So he just nods.

“No blanket,” he says. Gypsum rolls their eyes and chatters more. They don’t stop, after that, as though they’ve decided the atmosphere no longer matters. 

The Prisoner wanders through the wreckage, paying more attention to what Gypsum pauses to poke at than anything else. They have a better eye for detail than the Prisoner ever did. And it’s… amusing to watch them discover things, even things that would mean nothing to any sane owlk.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Gypsum is the first to open the case and see the color beneath. They make a high little sound of surprise, and the Prisoner turns. He sees a painting at the alien’s fingertips. It’s an old piece. The Eye of the Universe, growing from the eye of an owlk skull. It lacks skill and precision—the Prisoner was never very practiced at the visual arts, but he’d tried his hand at it when he realized he’d be living an eternity in a very small paradise. 

Gypsum chatters something. When the Prisoner cocks his head, they gesture animatedly. They point between the Prisoner and the painting and mirror his cocked head. 

Ah. “Yes,” the Prisoner answers. 

Gypsum grins and points both of their thumbs upward. Bemused, the Prisoner believes it must be some sort of compliment, and he returns the gesture as best he can. Gypsum laughs at him. 

In the end, there is nothing else left of the house. If something must remain, the Prisoner supposes it’s only right that it would be nothing of use. He’s never helped anything. Only watched for music in the stars and painted like he believed endings could be beautiful, as a child might, as a dying creature might.

But Gypsum likes the painting enough to bring it back with them. They prop it up against the tree roots so the purple lines catch the light of their projector flames and turn them silver. 

When the Prisoner learns enough of Gypsum’s language to understand swears, he is finally unable to keep avoiding their questions. 

They’re puzzling out the symbol lock on a back door of one of the archives, curious about slide reels locked behind it. The mechanisms click satisfyingly. The Prisoner’s claws linger over the wheels, watching Gypsum’s hands flicker in directions; forward, back, wait. 

“This still feels like cheating,” Gypsum says. 

“Mm.”

“I feel like I should be able to go somewhere and find some secret door where the codes for these will be, or something. Go back to the fire-looking one. Hold it there, thanks.” 

“You were not born a breaker of safes?” the Prisoner wonders. 

“Nope. I was born to fly spaceships directly into the sun,” is the cheerful reply. “But instead I’m stuck in fake bird heaven.” 

“It is not a heaven,” the Prisoner says. Again. “It is a memory of the home we destroyed.”

“Yeah, but we’re all still dead.”

“You are determinedly cheerful about this.” 

Gypsum shoots him a look over their shoulder, half grinning. “What, I’m supposed to be all mopey about it like you?”

“I do not mope. I consider.”

“You’re such a moper. Esker would be impressed.”

The Prisoner clicks the mechanism to the next symbol, and Gypsum’s ears flick as they focus. “Hm. And who was Esker?”

“One of the older space travelers,” Gypsum says. “They were on the Attlerock. That’s what we call the moon that orbits Timberhearth—er. Orbited.”

“It is good that you had many friends,” the Prisoner tells them. “You must’ve learned much from them.”

“I’m still learning from them.”

The Prisoner smiles. It warms him to hear Gypsum’s care for those they grew up with. “I am certain the Hearthians would be pleased to know they are remembered with such a legacy.”

Gypsum rolls their eyes. “I meant you.”

The Prisoner blinks. “Oh.”

“What, am I not your friend?” Gypsum says, and the Prisoner searches hurriedly for words for a moment before spying their teasing grin. He glares. 

“Then again,” Gypsum continues pointedly, “friends usually know each other’s names.”

The Prisoner pretends not to hear them. This technique is as ineffective as it usually is. Gypsum scrawls another note on the door in charcoal before turning. “So what is it.” 

The Prisoner’s feathers puff. “Do you wish to determine the next symbol?”

“Stop changing the subject. You always do this. How about if you don’t tell me what to call you, then I’m going to open this door all on my lonesome and not tell you what I find on the other side.”

Fangs bared, the Prisoner lifts a hand. “You would not.”

“I would! So spill it.” Gypsum crosses their arms, the folds of their quilted outfit making their shoulders look larger then they are. 

The Prisoner twists their face into the most intimidating snarl they can manage. The unreal air feels cold on their fangs. The muscles beneath Gypsum’s eye-ridges quirk up. They don’t budge. And the look is in their eye. The Prisoner is not going to win this—he never does. 

“This question is personal,” he tries.

“It’s your fucking name,” Gypsum says.

For a moment, the Prisoner considers lying. He doesn’t know what he’d say, however—and he would rather not be another secret. Feathers puffed up in a sigh, he rests his talons back over the mechanism. “I do not have one,” he says.

“What?”

“It was stripped from my… code. When I was sent here after my crime.”

“That’s bullshit!” Gypsum says, far louder than the Prisoner had expected.

“It is just a version of our traditional justice with more finality,” the Prisoner tries to explain. “After all, what name would I require in an eternity alone? I am nothing but a prisoner. My family would call me nothing more than a disgrace.”

“Well, I’m not gonna,” Gypsum declares. 

The Prisoner hoots softly. He wonders if this warm feeling is a new form of amusement at Gypsum’s passion. They are as committed to their worldview as they are curious, and it is a strange and often conflicting state. 

“How about Isgra?” 

The Prisoner frowns. “What?”

“As a name.” Gypsum turns back to the safe, as though the matter is closed. “If you don’t like it we can come up with something else. But I’m not calling you ‘that one owlk I know’ in my head until I’m blown out.”

The Prisoner turns it over in his head. It does not sound like a howled word, but it doesn’t sound like a Hearthian one, either. Isgra—the heart of disgrace, but not the whole of it. Just a piece of something bigger.

“That is… agreeable to me,” Isgra says. 

Gypsum shrugs. “Cool. Will you try the half-moon next? I have a theory.”

***

“How did you come to be here?” 

Isgra wonders it as Gypsum is lying on the floor of the hut, staring at the simulated stars through the patched roof. It’s beautiful and static. Gorgeous and soulless, like so much of this place. They’re idly tapping Chert’s rhythm against the silver base of their artifact. The green flame gives off no heat, and despite all these years, it still unnerves them.

“Our satellite picked you guys up in some of its images,” Gypsum says. “Blocking out the light. So I investigated, and one thing lead to another, and now I’m here.”

“I do not understand.”

“What, you don’t know me to fuck around and find out?”

They hear Isgra hoot a quiet laugh. “This is familiar to me. But I do not know why you would leave your friends—family—to come here and live forever.”

Gypsum winces. “It’s… a little more complicated than that.”

There follows an open, pregnant silence, and Gypsum feels Isgra’s white eyes trained on the side of their face. The owlk has a very particular way of expressing questions. It mostly involves looming and looking generally terrifying, which is inconvenient, because Gypsum already gets nightmares about getting their skull broken by fangs to the tune of the Ember Twin's sand. And now that Isgra is more comfortable speaking, he asks a lot of questions. 

Gypsum tosses a rock into the air, watches it spin, and catches it. They sigh. “So, you remember those Nomai?”

For an immortal beast programmed into a physical simulation, Isgra takes quite a long time to accept the concept of a time loop. “No, it’s because of white holes. Jump into a black hole, get tossed out of the white one a few fractalkine instants before you jumped?” 

“Impossible. You would be in two places at once.”

“Yeah, what else is new?” Gypsum snorts. “Someone’s never been to Dark Bramble. Anyway, it wasn’t my actual body. Just my memories—although. I wonder what would’ve happened if I had flown myself physically into—”

“Might we attempt to focus?”

“Right, right. So the Nomai had this whole setup for beaming information three and a half days into the past, and I accidentally got caught up in it thousands of years after the fact.”

Isgra’s feathers are standing on end. “But—the energy differential that would be required for such a device—”

“Would require a source equal to or exceeding the force of a supernova,” Gypsum finishes, and lets the silence make their point. 

“Ah. You came here because your solar system was ending. It was the only way for you to survive.” 

Not just my solar system, Gypsum doesn’t say, thinking of the starless world they’d left behind. The nothingness, devoid of the life that could experience its beauty. There would be no more searing white light on edge of eyelids. There would be no more music cried from the agony and wonder of living into a void that listened. 

“I’d hoped that you would be able to save my family, too,” Gypsum says instead. “But, ah. I haven’t exactly been well-received here. You guys don’t take well to the new.”

“I am sorry.”

Gypsum waves him away. “No, no. It would just be my memory of them, anyway. Even if I could upload them into this dream, it wouldn’t be them, you know?”

Besides, Feldspar would hate it here. Chert would find the new stars interesting for a few weeks, and then wish for something beyond them. They all would—they’d hear the echo of their banjos, their drums, their harmonicas and flutes and voices off rocks that aren’t real, absorbed in water that can hold neither warmth nor melodies, and they would turn away. They would say to Gypsum that at least they had died with the warmth of the stars on their faces. 

They would say that a life where you know everything is no life at all. 

But Isgra, who was not raised with sap wine and the distinct jealousy of waving to departing spaceships, scrapes his claws in the dirt and says, “perhaps not, but is it even us? I could ask—”

Gypsum sits up sharply. “If you say you’ll talk to the other owlks for me, I’m going to punch you.”

Isgra huffs. “That sounds rude. It is kind of me—”

“I don’t want you locked in any more boxes, alright? Especially not for me.”

“I do not wish this either,” Isgra says, shivering. “But… I do not know how long I have been free, anymore.” His antler clatters against the bark of the wetland tree around them. “And it is better, of course it is. But I—did not know how long I was alone, either. Do you understand?”

Gypsum does. Gypsum has for years, as their body decayed away on a lonely, invisible ship in a dead universe, and it terrifies them as much now as it had when they’d pulled the warp core from its flowered casing once and for all. What does a Hearthian hate more than a cage?

They climb to their feet. “It’ll be fine,” they say with the venom of someone who doesn’t believe it. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Gypsum.”

“Can we not—do this now?” Gypsum leaves a long furrow in the mud when they drag the toe of their old boot behind them. “Just. Not now.”

Isgra looks at them, his silver eyes reflecting Gypsum back in duality. Before they’d practically lived with the creature, Gypsum had thought owlk faces were unexpressive. Flat. Cold. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 

“Alright,” croons Isgra quietly. With the kind of pity that Gypsum knows is just as reflected. “Why don’t you tell me about your friends?”

Gypsum smiles. “The good stories, or the one about Gossan’s eye?”

So they sit, in that hut made of shadows, and they talk about the lost. Gypsum knows they are mourning something entirely else, and does not mention the way Isgra’s eyes fill with tears when he looks at the planet above them. Like always. 

***

Sometimes, Isgra will sit on the edge of the canyon and burn candles to their quicks.

The ones set in sconces to be lit by the focused light of a projector are not truly burning. After so many years, there would be none left, after all. Orange firelight is the purest form of the simulation—an illusion meant to comfort without consequence. So the candles never burn down, and the wax never liquifies, and the light remains just on the empty side of warmth. 

But they burn green, if he passes them through the flame of his projector. Properly burn. The wax dissolves into smeared green numerals and then to nothing, the same nothing that all of this is, as heart. 

It’s only here, destroying even more of it than he already has, that he lets himself think the homedream is… impressive, at the very least. A testament of ingenuity. A technological marvel, really, and the fact that it is as complete as it is deserves honor. Many of Isgra’s fellows died in the pursuit of its creation. Even if Isgra doesn’t believe in that pursuit, their conviction is still admirable.

Gypsum talks about the beauty of the universe. From this angle, lit with candles and crackling with the nostalgia of dark water rushing through canyon walls, this is a very beautiful thing. 

Gypsum isn’t here. Neither of them enjoy being alone, but neither of them enjoy being watched, either. Isgra, while he is losing time to wooden walls, forgetting that the vault was ever opened. Gypsum, while they are combing through slide reels like there could be any secrets remaining, like stagnation is not the inevitability of eternity. So, alone, Isgra tosses the waxen remains of a stone out into the chasm. Alone, he imagines the splash it should make. 

Alone, he hears the howl of an owlk behind him. 

He’s on his feet in an instant, sheltering his projector flame with his torso as claws shred the branches where his head had been. He feels the empty edge of the canyon on his heels. The snarl that curls from his throat is more a plea than a threat. 

“You,” comes a bugling voice he has not heard in a long, long time. 

Cicado’s antlers bristle with draped fabric. The feathers around her eyes are darkened by her age, and her claws are stained with the metallic residue of her projector. Isgra remembers the way her robe was so worn, so soft, when he’d rubbed her back in comfort as she wept for the homeworld they lost. 

“What are you— how are you— what is this?” Cicado keens. She reaches for him, claws curled and pock-marked and serrated. 

Isgra is frozen. Undone. Encased in wood and black stone, he cannot move, and he doesn’t wish to. Doesn’t wish to fight and fail, doesn’t wish to pretend. He waits for freefall to claim him, or for teeth to part his feathers, or for the familiar grip of his projector to be wrenched away from him. 

But Cicado never touches him. Her hand trembles, a meteor caught too close to the sun, and as Isgra stares at her, he realizes there are tears in her great, moon white eyes. 

“I don’t believe this,” she says. 

Slowly, Isgra raises his head. Steps away from the precarious edge of the canyon. “I never meant for anyone to see,” he says. To see his escape, to see him here now, to see his crime, when seeing always burned his kind. His voice sounds strange, stilted. It takes him a moment to realize that after so long, he’s thinking in Hearthian and translating as he speaks. 

Cicado is shaking her head. “It’s not possible,” she says. “It is not. We burned everything. You should be lost to the dark.”

“Please,” is all Isgra can say. Please. He bows his head, a fawn to his elder. 

The tears in Cicado’s eyes slip down the feathers of her cheeks. “Oh, child,” she whispers. “We did so much, and it wasn’t enough. They are all dead. Our story ended anyway.” 

“So, you’re saying you always knew this plan was shit.”

Gypsum stands against the base of one of the transport hands that dot the shrouded woodlands like graves. They are doing their best to glare holes through this new, ancient owlk. She’s the same one that had stood before the fireplace as the sun collapsed. She’d broken Gypsum’s neck a few times, when they’d thrown their artifact aside in an attempt to seal themselves within the simulation. Nightmare material. And Isgra—

Isgra appears to be doing his best impression of a Nomai statue. The only thing that assures Gypsum he hasn’t slipped unreachably far into that vault in his mind is the way he still dutifully translates between languages. The vision torch, which Gypsum hadn’t missed, is once again clutched in their hand.

The owlk, whom Isgra informed them is named Cicado, moans something quiet and resigned. Her voice is distinct. Gypsum hadn’t known how to identify the subtle shifts of pitch and tone when they’d first come to the Stranger, but they’re surprised to find it’s almost second nature now. 

A part of them is delighted. A part of them wants to grab this elder by the hand and ask wide-eyed question like they used to when Hornfels still flew missions. She must know so much. She’s from a different solar system, for star’s sake, she’s seen a sun Gypsum has never even imagined. It’s incredible.

And she’d used that incredible knowledge for what, exactly?

Gypsum looks at Isgra again. They almost miss the words they murmur, too busy searching the owlk for some sign, any sign, of what Gypsum is supposed to do here. 

“It was the only plan we had,” Isgra says in Cicado’s name. “But we are not magicians, little creature. We cannot make something from nothing.”

Everything built in darkness returns to it, Gypsum wants to say. Everything borne to the light will remain in it. Instead, they raise their eye-ridges. “How long would you say you have?”

The owlks howl at each other for a moment. Then Isgra says, “another few thousand years.”

Gypsum almost chokes. They’d been resigned to eternity, but—

“Oh. That’s… a long time.” The mechanisms the owlks built must be incredibly efficient. Charging themselves with the light of the sun since before the Nomai even arrived, powering the simulation, and storing excess for the anticipated demise of the solar system… 

But nothing lasts forever.

“The mothership was originally calibrated to use the thrust of the supernova to direct it toward the orbit of a nearby star,” Isgra translates. “But doubtlessly, after so long, those coordinates are no longer precise. It is up to chance if we reach the power of another star. We may yet live.”

Gypsum swallows. Glances at Isgra again. “That’s… not gonna happen.”

“Yes, I agree it is unlikely.”

Finding a wholly un-nibbled marshmallow around Slate is unlikely. This is the fantasy of a ghost at the end of the universe. “So, you won’t waste reserve power trying to create more avatars in the simulation,” Gypsum assumes, a bit bitterly.

Isgra’s feathers shift. Finally, they meet Gypsum’s gaze—and when they speak again, it isn’t just translation. “Even if it were possible to extrapolate your memories without the machinery she once had, the drain on the simulation might erase us all. I’m sorry, Gypsum.”

“It’s fine,” they say. “It was just a theory, anyway.”

Just a theory. Just the desperate hope they’d clung to for ten long loops, carefully and torturously memorizing every word of every Hearthian they could, dragging their shoddily modified signalscope between planets and ship’s log over and over and over. Just the idea of a happy ending for which they’d tossed away Isgra’s sacrifice, the Nomai’s legacy, the Hearthian’s oaths. The eternal cage of a time loop for the eternal cage of a dream. 

It’s their turn to look away from Isgra. Gypsum can judge and pity the owlks all they want, but in the end, they’re no better. All Cicado had done was try and protect their family. What has Gypsum done?

The universe is silent, and dark, and it’s their fault. 

Cicado howls something, stepping forward as if to reach for the vision torch. Both Gypsum and Isgra flinch away instinctively all the same.

“She wishes to know how you freed me,” Isgra asks. His voice falters on the last words. 

It’s almost a relief, the burst of anger. Regret is so much heavier. “Tell her she can go fuck herself.”

Isgra chuckles without mirth. “I would also like to know this, Gypsum.”

Gypsum hesitates a moment. Then sighs. “They hid everything pretty well. Burned the slide reels and the codes for the seals on the vaults. But they forgot one thing.”

Isgra cocks his head, eyes crinkling. “And what’s that?”

“I’m a Hearthian,” Gypsum says with a smirk. “And Hearthians don’t let anything stay erased.”

It’s a pretty speech. They like it better than the truth—which is that with enough time, enough boredom, and enough recklessness, anything is possible. 

The owlks howl at each other for a moment. Gypsum regrets not being the one to learn the other’s language. Though, on the bright side, they’ll have another millennium to become fluent, apparently. 

Stars. They wish Hal were here. 

They don’t know why it changes anything, knowing that the simulation will end too. It’s not as though they could really conceptualize forever to begin with. But it feels oddly like that sinking feeling in their stomach when they’d learned that the Sun Station was a failure—that the Nomai’s promise had ended up a lie beneath the sheer scale of the universe. Gypsum had thrown away everything for immortality, and it turns out it isn’t even immortality. Just ancientness.

They don’t want to be ancient. They’re already ancient. They don’t think they want to be immortal, either. 

Trying so hard to give death and time meaning has just stripped it of all wonder, hasn’t it? 

***

“What is it calling you?” Cicado asks, once Gypsum has run themselves dry of their third round of questions. The Hearthian sits on a tree root, stabbing a stick into the mud with violent intensity, as they brew up more. 

“They call me Isgra,” he replies, refusing to balk as he speaks. 

Cicado looks at him with pity. It shouldn’t hurt—what can she do to him that she hasn’t already, after all—but it does. “That is not your name. You have no name, traitor.”

Carefully, Isgra takes a breath. “We are dead in all the ways that matter. Do you truly still believe I have not been punished enough?”

It’s not hate on Cicado’s face. It’s an aching sort of confusion, like a lost child. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. But… we lost so many to what that creature claims was the breaking of the dam. And too many more blew out their own flames in their grief. We built this as a paradise. Why is it so lonely?”

Isgra wants to laugh, suddenly. Wants to roar. Wants to shove Cicado into the sinkhole marshes and watch that green fire extinguish without smoke. “You are asking me that, Cicado?”

She does not look at him. It’s not as gratifying as he might’ve wished it to be. 

They are quiet for a moment. The simulated wind blows through the leaves of the lowland willows, and there’s the creak of wood and the faint splashing of an owlk’s raft navigating the river. Gypsum has stopped jabbing at the ground. There’s something calculating on their face. Some dawning realization that Isgra knows he will not understand, but will listen to all the same. 

“We could dispose of it,” Cicado says suddenly.

For a moment, Isgra doesn’t comprehend. Can’t. Then he’s standing between Cicado and Gypsum, fangs bared, claws curled tight around his projector. 

“They are an outsider,” Cicado tells him. “We did not build this place for something like them.”

“I will not allow it.”

Cicado’s claws tap sharply on the metal of her projector. “We would live longer with the battery power they otherwise consume.”

“You would kill for a few more meaningless years?” Isgra demands. Then, scathingly, “like you did to me? Like you did when you silenced the Eye—”

“Enough!” Cicado roars. “We do not speak of it!”

Isgra takes a step forward. He feels wild, like he had in those first years within the vault, and his voice swallows Gypsum’s yelp of surprise. “Why not? Why not, Cicado? Why, when we lived worse because we were afraid? Why, when we died anyway? We cannot unlearn. We cannot undo what has been done.” 

“You dishonor us. All we’ve become—”

“All we’ve ever been are cowards,” Isgra spits, and it does not fix the shredded space where his soul should be. 

“Isgra.”

“We are nothing. We are nothing. I am nothing.”

“Isgra.” 

It’s Gypsum’s voice, firm and sharp. Isgra takes a stumbling step back, realizing he’d been looming above the ancient form of his once-teacher. His throat is rough from the edges of Hearthian consonants. He hadn’t been speaking owlk. 

Gypsum takes his wrist. Their ears are set high with certainty, and their eyes are sad and scared and so, so determined when they say, “I have to tell you something.”

Isgra breaths. It rattles in his chest. He does not know if shame or despair curves his shoulders more when he brings his projector forward to hold it to his chest. He asks, “what must I know?”

Gypsum glances at Cicado. “It’s… let’s go somewhere else. Okay? She won’t understand.”

They say it like it means more than just language. Isgra nods and lets himself be lead through the trees. The transport hands run their spindled fingers across the shadows of the night. Isgra feels his talons sinking into the dirt, and he wishes he could feel truly dirty. He wishes he’d ever be truly clean. 

They stand on the bridge across the river, in the end. The candles flicker immaterial to either side, and they can see their reflections in the dark water. 

“The universe ended years ago,” Gypsum says, then, and Isgra feels nothing.

***

“When I was a hatchling, I was taught there’s always something new to learn,” Gypsum murmurs to the stars that don’t exist. “I wonder what Gossan would say now, about all this.”

“I am sorry.” Isgra’s voice is calm. “For what it’s worth, I am sure they didn’t know they were lying.”

The wood of the bridge creaks. Gypsum turns. “They weren’t lying.” 

Isgra doesn’t look away from the dark water. His missing antler makes his reflection look broken, like something forgotten and weathered. “It’s too late for comfort, Gypsum. The universe is over. It’s too late for everything.”

“No see—no.” Stars, they’re doing this all wrong. They’re as bad as Slate. “There’s still us.”

“Is there?” Isgra smiles without humor. “To be honest, I do not feel very real. I have not felt real since those vault doors closed in front of me.”

Gypsum drops their forehead against the railing of the bridge. The prisoner’s words are still echoing in their mind. We are nothing. I am nothing. Gypsum cannot shake the feeling that they did this to him, in the end. They turned him meaningless. 

But they won’t let things stay that way. They are the ambassador of home, and they carry the legacy of the Nomai, and it’s time to find some damn answers. 

“I’ve lied to you,” Gypsum says. They’re proud of how little their voice shakes. 

Isgra looks up. 

“I’ve lied. I made—a mistake. And I think I can think of a way to fix it, but… I can’t do it alone.”

“Gypsum?”

Gypsum takes a breath. “I know where to find the Eye of the Universe.” 

What should be silence is filled, as their words fall into dark water and darker sky, by a sound. Gypsum imagines it, and is certain it is there all the same. The note of seven instruments, waiting for a conductor. They do not let themselves turn away from Isgra as his eyes reflect violet, and perhaps his reflection is not broken at all. Perhaps it is half a star, a thousand etched lines emanating from a single point.

“What?” he breathes.

“The time loop—it was built by the Nomai to find the coordinates of the Eye. And once they were found, the statues reached out to anyone who could see, anyone who could learn what was waiting on the edge of the solar system,” Gypsum says. They feel like they’re reading scripture. “That someone was me.”

“You know.” Isgra takes a step forward. “You always knew.”

Gypsum closes two of their eyes and nods. They clutch their artifact against their chest, protectively or in offering, they aren’t sure. This is a secret so many have died for. Perhaps they would be honored to be the next. 

“I’m sorry,” Gypsum says.

“You knew. And you did not… face it?” Isgra says the words like he can’t comprehend them. “You turned away?”

“I was—I was scared,” Gypsum says. It sounds weak to their ears, and it is. “I thought I could fix it, somehow.”

“You were supposed to be different,” Isgra murmurs. There’s a fire darker than a void beneath his eyes. “I thought you were different.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I—I didn’t know. I still don’t know. What if the Eye isn’t something good?”

But I don’t fear the Eye, anymore. 

Solanum’s whisper rings in Gypsum’s ears, mingling with Isgra’s answer until they can no longer distinguish the two. “What if it is?”

Isgra turns away, then. His shadow is like black tar on the wooden slats, his shoulders hunched, and his footsteps are the howl of the Quantum Moon and the crackle of Nomai writing and the click of slide reels progressing. Above them, the lost homeworld of the owlks glows its lonely sapphire light.  

Gypsum has so many dreams to carry home. 

“I’m going to find out,” Gypsum calls. The artifact feels warm, and so does their chest, despite the shadows. Even if they had died, they had died in fire, after all. 

Isgra stops. He’s trembling—with rage or grief, Gypsum can’t tell. “It’s too late,” he says again.

“I’m a Hearthian,” Gypsum replies. “That’s never stopped me before. Nothing is certain until there’s someone there to see it.”

And maybe it’s the millennium, or maybe it’s the supernova, or maybe it’s the mere fact that Hearthians don’t exist, not anymore, but Gypsum realizes Isgra is laughing. Laughing, his artifact dropping from his claws. Laughing, his face dropped into scaled palms. Laughing, fallen to his knees on the steps of the bridge, and he says, “shall we meet its Eye, then?”

“If it’s the last thing we do.”

Gypsum’s nightmares change, after that. 

They are not haunted by a thousand deaths, so much as they are hounded by a hundred questions. Once again, they have turned their gaze away from a world they know. It feels like launch day. Having a mystery to solve does wonders for their health, apparently. 

Cicado tells the remaining owlks—four Strangers that Isgra seems perfectly content to ignore, so Gypsum doesn’t feel quite so guilty passing the vision torch among them—that the vault is broken. They tell her they have a plan to create more power for the simulation. It’s the kind of consequenceless lie that would make Marl proud, for it will be a thousand years before she knows if they failed.

Nothing can be done from within the predetermined walls of the simulation. Cicado remembers much of the process of it’s creation, digging half-decayed slide reels from the muck of the lowlands and beneath the floorboards of the forbidden archives to augment what she doesn’t. She refuses to let Gypsum view them, at first. Even dishonored, hated Isgra is preferred to an outsider. 

But Isgra relays everything he learns, and alone in the night, they speak in low voices about what must be done to reach the Eye. Sticks carve calculations onto the wet earth. Theories turn to dreams, and they wake with time spread out in loops before them. 

Everything seems possible. Everything must be possible. But there is one rule that remains absolute, no matter what they do.

“In the real world, we are dead,” Isgra says. Cicado paces, her joints creaking, on the other side of the manor house. “We cannot return our consciousnesses to empty bones.”

“But—say we could.” Gypsum waves their arms. They keep reaching out to pluck lanterns from the walls, getting growled at by Cicado, and reluctantly returning them. “Everything that wasn’t destroyed by the dam breaking would still be operational. Running on the same reserve power that it was when I showed up. Seems like a waste of precious energy to me, but hey, I didn’t design the mechanisms.”

Isgra gives them a look before translating, doubtlessly leaving out the last part. Tugging at her horn, Cicado muses something. 

“She thinks that anyone physically navigating the mothership would be able to recalibrate its machinery, yes,” Isgra says. “If the signals were still active in your time, they may yet still be active now.”

“You guys make some hardy tech,” Gypsum chirps. In another universe, Slate would’ve pillaged the Stranger down to its last atom and turned it into something far more flammable. 

“Thank you,” Isgra snorts. 

“So the Eye Signal Blocker,” continues Gypsum, shooting a glance at Cicado. “They destroyed the control unit for it after you pulled your little act of moral treason, but the Stranger is still receiving information from it, right?”

“Yes. We could not determine a way to consistently use the Eye itself as a power source, due to it’s… irregular nature,” Isgra says. His feathers puff in some memory, and Gypsum chuckles.

“Yeah, irregular is one way to put it. So, if I had enough time to back-calculate the location of the Eye from those readings—”

They’re interrupted by Cicado’s curious trill. Isgra winces. He moans something back, and Gypsum lets him continue their lie as they consider the calculations. It would take… a long time. And in the real world, that means things like food and water and warmth. Gypsum’s never been the best in the village at quantitative astronomy. Not for the first time, they wish Slate were here.

But… part of them is, isn’t it? Slate’s helping hand had lead Gypsum through the entire universe. Always. 

“My ship’s log,” Gypsum says suddenly, interrupting the owlk’s speech. 

“What?”

“My ship’s log. It’s—it catalogs the data my space suit or my Little Scout collected. Collects. It can find anything it’s found before.”

Isgra steps toward them, lantern casting shadows across his robe. “What do you mean?”

“If we can import the signal jammer’s history into my ship’s log, it’ll consider it a known location,” Gypsum says excitedly. “It can find it. On autopilot, even. Slate, I could kiss you!”

“How would we do this?” Isgra says, ignoring Cicado as the infectious delight of Gypsum with a puzzle rolls across him.

“My scout would be the best bet,” Gypsum says. “It’d probably destroy half the present features—sorry, little guy—but it would automatically report to the ship’s log. If it’s hooked up to whatever you have exporting frequencies to the signal jammer, it could receive all that data. Which will fry it, but it’ll have time to communicate the coordinates.”

“It’s a wire system. In the walls of the reservoir,” Isgra tells them.

“Perfect, I know where that is.” Gypsum snaps their fingers. “What’s edible in that mothership of yours?”

“Is your diet… compatible with ours?”

It’s a good question, admittedly. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Something jabs Gypsum—hard—in the side. They jerk out of their reverie to see Cicado with the vision torch in her hand, looking frustrated. Gypsum resists the urge to stick out their tongue, grinning instead. 

“Tell her I know how to switch off all the unnecessary power drains,” they say. “Your kind will have an eternity longer to rot in the dark.”

***

How lucky is it, that all the nights are gorgeous?

Isgra sits in the old, worn chairs by a stage he remembers well. He has a headache—he hadn’t realized that was possible. Gypsum, chattering about nothing as they poke at game pieces on the table, isn’t helping.

“You’re cheating,” Isgra tells them as the game pieces slide across the board.

Gypsum pauses. “I didn’t know we were playing.”

The chair creaks beneath Isgra as he turns, reaching out to carefully rearrange the pieces. These wooden shapes are modeled after ones he carved when he was a fawn, but he doesn’t think about that now. Those years have passed.

“I’m not very good at board games,” Gypsum warns. 

For some reason, it makes Isgra fond. “I have not had anyone to play with in a thousand years, Gypsum. I’m not very good either.”

And they aren’t. They play like children, following half-remembered rules. Gypsum wins, because Gypsum thinks further than Isgra had known was possible before he met them, and the stars never change. 

***

Gypsum re-watches the slide reels documenting the entry mechanics for the simulation. So often that they hear the clicks in their dreams. 

You cannot wake from a dream if you have no body to return to. 

Gypsum rewatches the slide reels documenting the entry mechanics for the simulation. Again, and again, and again. 

That simple fact never changes.

***

When he is finally certain the sound will not get them both killed, Isgra plays his therallo.

It’s loud, and unhidden, and though it cannot echo through rocks that don’t exist, the notes turn back on themselves all the same. He plays an old song. Not as he’d written it then, but as he hears it in his mind now, caught on the strings of an echo. 

He doesn’t get to finish. When he looks up, he sees Gypsum standing frozen in the doorway, and the bow in his hand slips. The Hearthian is weeping, silently, their hand over their mouth. 

“What?” Isgra says, dropping the instrument as he approaches. The last incomplete note fades.

“Nothing,” Gypsum gasps. “Just—I haven’t heard music in a while. I thought I was alone.”

***

The vision torch glows green, and Cicado shakes her head. She returns images of bones and empty beds and flames gone dark.

“I know,” Gypsum says. They take the vision torch, trying to explain. There has to be some way. There has to be something, there always is. 

But again, Cicado shakes her head. 

Gypsum grinds their teeth in frustration, shoving the vision torch back into the ancient owlk’s claws. They wish they had their scout, their jetpack, their ship’s log—anything to give them another tool. Another angle. 

When they’d been stuck as they navigated the solar system, they’d known to look elsewhere for answers they wouldn’t have expected. There’s no failure, they tell themselves. There can’t be, when everything they try creates a new lead to be unraveled, a new clue to be unpacked. If you can’t find what you need where you are, explore further.

But there’s nowhere further to go. There’s just this simulation that they know every single crevice of. There’s only the ghosts of creatures that had tried to kill them, and one that had tried to save them before their ancestors had even emerged from the water. There’s only the memory of a ship that they’d visited every tiny piece of, died to every possible danger within, seen every broken engraving atop—

Wait. 

Gypsum stops, hand still extended. Their four eyes narrow. 

Gypsum is not the only soul that entered this simulation unusually. Gypsum is not the only outsider here, not really. Isgra, who is resting now, had never told them what had happened before the vault doors had closed. He’d never described the prison his kind had created for him in the real world—but it had been a vault. It had been sealed.

There is one place in the Stranger that Gypsum was never able to set foot.

Snatching the torch back from Cicado, they hastily construct a question. A scattering of images of Isgra, of the vault, of the green chain symbols they had blown out so long ago turned dark in the real world. A box sealed, but no longer locked. 

They see Cicado’s eyes light with realization. And as Gypsum watches their memories stitched through green light, they grin. 

Always another angle.

***

“I’ve been thinking about it all wrong.”

Isgra rubs the sleep from his eyes and tries to focus on Gypsum’s waving hands. The Hearthian’s projector flame is flickering madly, as though they have not calmed themselves for hours—days, probably. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been assuming it would be me,” Gypsum says. “That I’d wake up, that I’d fly the ship, that I’d—touch the end of the universe. But it won’t be me. It has to be you.”

Isgra freezes. Stares at Gypsum as though that will somehow sort the words they’re spouting into some semblance of logical order. “What?”

“It’s not death that keeps us from waking up,” Gypsum declares. “Death’s never stopped us. It’s that we have nothing left for our brainwaves to re-energize when we do wake, so everything that we are simply… dissipates into the larger universe. Lost. But if we had a body, and enough brainwaves to re-energize it—”

“You think—”

“I think you’ve been sealed away for millennia in an airtight, water-chilled room. I think—and yeah, it’s gross, but hear me out—you have enough tissue left that you might not even be properly dead." Gypsum bounces on the balls of their feet. "If we shut down the simulation, all that power will be discharged through you. Jumpstart your heart, even." 

"You're insane."

"It's going to work!"

"The others will never let you destroy the homedream."

Gypsum waves a dismissive hand. "I'll do it without them knowing. Can't be worse than all the other shit I've done."

"The vault is unbreechable—"

"No. The interplay between the simulation and your world extends to it. I dismissed the seals; it's unlocked." 

"You don't understand our biology! The vault was not built for cryogenics—"

"But it acts as one!" Gypsum interrupts, voice rising. "It's going to work, Isgra! You're the only one that has a chance. You know what to eat in the Stranger. You know how to interpret your kind's data sources. You know how to believe in the Eye—you've known about it longer than my whole race has even existed—" 

"But you'll die, Gypsum!" Isgra yells. He's on his feet, though he doesn't remember when he rose. He takes Gypsum’s hands in his talons, because words will not mean the same as his heartbeat when they finally answered a question

The wildness in Gypsum’s eyes softens. "I'm already dead," they say. "Let me do this. Let me finish the story." 

Isgra’s fear chokes him. "But I will be alone." 

Flowers bloom purple and candles burn gold, and never had Isgra thought that going home would feel like this. Gypsum smiles, sadly, knowingly, naively. "No," they tell him. "Whatever comes next, we'll all be waiting for you." 

***

It’s a little nostalgic, knowing they’re going to die. 

Gypsum hadn’t missed it, really, but this familiar, mortal resignation is like a relic from a time long past. Another life , they think with the sort of smile that would make Gabbro roll their eyes. At least they’re practiced enough at dying that they aren’t scared, anymore. 

The same cannot be said for Isgra. They stand together on the woven cliffs of the forbidden archive beneath the endless canyon, the colored bubbles of their artifacts left behind. Void-white light falls across their shoulders. It paints their bodies in ghostly emptiness, just fragments of code clinging to their fear and their care and their minds, like children to their blankets in the dark. Isgra won’t look away from the artifacts they abandoned. Gypsum won’t look away from him. 

They’ve been ready for this for months. For longer than that, since before they’d even known it would end this way. They wish they could see real stars again, they suppose, but they’ve wished that before. 

It’s been everything they could’ve hoped for, these last months of life. A rush of exhilarating danger and learning and teaching, preparing for one last flight. They taught Isgra to read Hearthian. They probed for weaknesses in the simulation, places where they could reach inside and steal its sun-soaked lifeblood for their plan. They dodged Cicado’s suspicions. Dodged their own prickling guilt at the choice they were making for the last conscious remnants of a universe. 

Would they die a murderer? The white lines of unrendered code turn the simulation into ghosts beneath their hands, and they find they can’t care. It’s the end of the universe. The question feels almost selfish. 

“Are you ready?” they ask, quiet. Isgra finally pulls his gaze away from the pools of light—of perfect, masked illusion. 

His feathers, white and empty, flutter. One of his great talons still rests on the invisible bridge they’d crossed to reach this half-finished stone. Gypsum wonders what he sees when he looks at the simulation-truth version of them, if he finally believes that Gypsum doesn’t feel real either. That they aren’t only ready for this, but excited. 

Stars. Living is so strange, when you’ve forgotten what death means. 

“We could go back,” Isgra says, tilting his head back toward the archive. There’s no desire in his voice. But he’s right; one of them has to say it. “We could pretend.”

Gypsum scoffs. “Go back to what?” they wonder. “The dark?”

Isgra smiles slightly. “I am quite tired of the dark.”

“Then let’s do this.” Gypsum raises their hand, and Isgra meets it with his talon, and they have all the wrong number of fingers compared to each other, all the wrong number of stars. It’s like the tail end of a joke they hadn’t heard. Like watching Chert and Riebeck and Gabbro fly out on their ventures and dreaming of their own hand on the throttle. 

Isgra turns, stepping back across the unrendered bridges to retrieve his artifact. From the warm circle of color, his skin repainted with the Stranger Gypsum knows so well, he waves. 

Gypsum turns to the case at their left. They open the bleached white doors, and the destroyed code on the inside is a mess of black and green lines. The sourcecode of the simulation, unprotected. The owlks had cut through the code itself, burned the vault’s answers from their entire world, and left an open wound behind. 

Gypsum lifts their hand. Fingers curled above the simulation’s skin, they crane their head to look at Isgra. He holds his artifact against his chest. The little flame dances, and his inhales rattle against the metal lantern. Ready. 

They’ll miss him. But they think that’s the truth of the universe, somewhere—that there are things more beautiful than the two of them alone. 

“Three!” Gypsum calls. In their mind, they hear the click of their spaceship buckle belt closing them into the pilot’s chair.

“Two!” 

They imagine heat from the blackened simulation beneath their palm. It’s like looking down into the black hole within Brittle Hollow, like the first time they fell into it, certain of the end. But all they had found were more mysteries. All there ever will be are more mysteries. 

“One.”

Gypsum plunges their hand into the simulation’s heart and tears. Isgra raises the lantern to his face, and on the lingering note of Gypsum’s last breath, he blows his flame out. The dawn blooms behind Gypsum’s eyelids. It’s like blue fire. Searing their solar system to ash. 

Oblivion is an old friend, greeting them with open arms and a ladle of sap wine. 

They had missed home. But as sunlight pours from simulation to stranger, Gypsum sees its streams diverge—a tiny pinprick of power dripping somewhere lonely and loyal—and they suppose they must miss it a little bit longer. 

TWO: EXPLAIN

Even now, Isgra is grateful for his family’s hatred. 

Resurrection is neither waking nor dying, neither restless nor painful. It’s comparable, perhaps, to walking down the steps of his prison. Like the darkest passage he’s ever known, and then a light so pure it’s blinding. He knows, as stored sunlight washes his soul through the shafts of his feathers and swallows him as the fuel for green fire, that it is giving him wings. He falls all the same. 

Resurrection is opening eyes that have lost the cells to see in color. Resurrection is gasping for millenia’s of first breaths and choking on ice. Resurrection is metal walls and decayed feathers and the sense that you are more desperate than the universe ever intended any creature to become. 

Isgra’s tendons creak and his scales fall to the ground like coins. He coughs, dead eyes watering, shriveled hands cracking through layers of crystalline years. His claws seek out the walls around him. These breaths he is taking belong to the souls he had just destroyed—the minds echoing their frequencies within him just long enough to let him take hold of this once-body. It tastes like hatred. 

The vault was built so carefully, by a people that crave permanence. It was sealed so patiently, by mourners who had forgotten the stubbornness of explorers, and Isgra is thankful for it in crazed defiance as he finds the seam of the door. He hears chains clatter on the outside as he pulls. Pulls and pulls, the strength of a dead body and a half dozen minds, fading with the slow crack of light pouring into the space. 

He is impatient. Desperate. Isgra cuts deep furrows in this body’s papery skin when he drags himself through the toothed doors. He bleeds slow. It’s mesmerizing, for too many moments—he hasn’t bled in millenia. He hasn’t—

Is this pain? The clawing agony of starvation, of freezing, of dehydration, of suffocation? How could he ever have endured it?

A firepit stands empty in the center of a round wooden room. It still bears the metallic claws of simulation flames. But nothing burns in the homedream anymore. No one will dream of lies again. 

There exists no one, to dream or lie, again. 

Isgra keens, his bugle weak and cold as he limps toward the stairwell he can see surrounding the room. He doesn’t dare look back at the vault. It catches his colorless peripheral all the same. He remembers—

This body still has its robe torn from their furious claws. This body still cringes from the looming shape of a cage, still shudders at the sound of chains. It is alive all the same. He is alive. 

But who had won, in the end? Isgra is just as alone. 

There is water on the stairs. Isgra holds his breath when he ducks into it, half expecting to wake up elsewhere as a phantom green flame sizzles out—but instead, he simply soaks himself to the bone. His feathers tear free of his weakened skin. His lungs burn, and he swims down, looking for anything that sings like home. 

He sees a halo of light at the base of the structure. It’s almost too small to swim through, but he tilts his head and threads his antler through. His vision is blackening. But he can see light, now, surrounding him. He can hear rushing water. The current drags him slightly, and he lets it, focusing only on forcing himself up. 

Isgra’s head breaks the surface of the reservoir, and he is—

Real. 

The glass windows rise, immense and circular, to either side. The great green solar panels have been burned through by the force of supernovae. Through their tattered, gold edges, there is the inky black of the true world. Water arcs an infinite loop through weathered stone, eroded tree roots. Dirt scrapes Isgra’s bleeding knees when he washes up upon a half-submerged dock.

He’s sobbing. River water and tears mingle on his rotten feathers, and he scrapes rents in the stones with his claws just to prove that they are there. For the first time in so, so long, he has both hands free. For the first time in so, so long, he believes his heart is truly beating. 

He tears handfuls of dead and half-dead grass from the river banks, shoving it into his mouth. He pulls draping vines from tree branches and turns them to pulp between his fangs. He scrapes moss from the muddy ground, heedless of the dirt that drips from his hands, and swallows it until the nausea overwhelms him. 

Existence is only this, for many moments. When Isgra is once again aware he is sentient, he sinks to a seat on a broken bridge base and stares up at landmarks he’d thought he’d never see again. The tears that still roll down his face are no longer desperate. He doesn’t know this vastness in his chest, but he thinks he prefers it to a void. 

He thinks that Gypsum would laugh, if they were—

He thinks. 

This is not the simulation. This is life, with an end, and a reason to take another step. He is living again, and he is meant to take another step; meant to look into the universe. The plan picks its way through the jungle in his mind as his now-full stomach begins to settle. He wishes there were aguergats still alive in the muddy water, but he knows he won’t even find their delicate bones. It has been so long. 

He stands. Searching the banks of the waterways, it doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for. Uneven steps take him over to the wooden side of an overturned raft. He strains to flip it over. Stares without comprehension at the lenses that blink green back at him for far too long. 

Light. He needs—yes, there must be a lantern still glowing in the reservoir, somewhere. 

As he wanders, he catches sight of his own reflection in the rushing water. Even broken by the current as it is, he still looks like a monster. Like everything his family had feared they would become. He thinks of the painting Gypsum had found in his home, had kept in their hut—it seems like a self portrait, now. 

He looks away. He is living, and that is beautiful enough. That must be. 

When he recovers a lantern, he feels the first drift of warmth against his raw scales. The green light is a mockery of something. Or a truth. Isgra doesn’t have enough breath to know, and he is dreadfully alone in his own head.

All the same, he holds the lantern close. Glass soothes his feathers and turns his cloak green, and he watches the opaque surface as he climbs into the raft. It’s like watching the sun. He will never see the sun again—but then, he is not alone in that. 

Rafting is… enjoyable. It takes a while to notice, as he lets the water tug him through its currents and rock up over the low walls of the raft. But he likes the speed. Likes watching the world rush by and knowing that he can direct it, that he could leap into it if he wished. This is not a cage like the rafts of the simulation had been, but a tool. Isgra has missed tools. 

He knows where to go. The canyon village is an unrecognizable mess of broken bridges and rotten planks when he arrives, destroyed by time and the tsunami of the broken dam. But it is the least impossible thing Isgra has faced in his new life. He steers the raft as close as he can get to a secure platform, hauls himself onto half-rotted wood, and watches the whitewater wash the little boat away. What little exertion that took has left this wraith of a body out of breath. 

In testament to the strategies of the owlks, the elevator still works. Isgra lets it draw him, chain clanking, to the upper levels of the village. Then he clambors toward the hum of green he sees in the distance. The ritual room is still intact—still colorful, even, though Isgra can no longer distinguish the shades. Isgra feels like he’s moving in a memory as he pulls the lanterns away from the proper portrait and lets himself inside the stairwell with its spiraling embrace around the building. 

He knows what he will see. Of course he knows. But it still knocks the brand-new breath from his lungs, standing in the doorway of a tomb with the light of his lantern reflecting off bones. 

Skeletons hang from their beds around him. They face the dark fireplace, each and every one of their artifacts empty. Cicado’s carefully embroidered robe is visible, and Isgra tries not to look, tries not to think of the way the last act of her mind had been to bring him back to life. Even if it had not been her choice. 

His claws scrape on the glass of the lantern. He takes a breath. And, bracing this spine that feels so alien to him now, he looks down. 

There, sprawled by the empty hearth, is another corpse. Smaller, slimmer, clad in thick fabric and hung with heavy tech. An oxygen tank. A supply backpack. A scout launcher. Some sort of radio receiver, augmented with metal stripped from a simulation projector. Their hand is still curled, ever-so-carefully, around the beautiful mechanism Isgra knows is the Nomai warp core. 

Gypsum looks like they had gone to sleep comfortable. Looks like they spent so much of their life before sitting around flames. Their reflective helmet throws Isgra’s phantom reflection back at him. 

He kneels beside the body. Reaching out, he hooks his blackened claws beneath their helmet and cracks it free. His fingers are shaking. 

The skull inside is as white and pure as the owlks'. Peaceful and grotesque in one. Four empty eyesockets goggle at Isgra’s mournful howl, and he stitches the crinkle of a smile across them in his imagination. 

Dropping his head, he presses his forehead to the bone, cradled between his hands. “I’m sorry,” he says, and wants to laugh. The Hearthian words feel more natural in this dried and abused throat than his howls had. 

He closes his eyes. And in the silence of the dead mothership, the dead universe, he hears a sound. 

He raises his head. Something is clicking, softly. It’s not regular, and as Isgra listens, it falls into no repeating pattern. The clicking is metallic and insistent. 

Cocking his head, Isgra tries to follow the sound. In the echoing room, this task is more difficult than it should be. He probes at Gypsum’s skeleton. The warp core slides free of their dusty glove, and he catches it before it clatters onto the wooden ground. It’s warm against his hand. 

The clicking continues. It speeds up as Isgra’s hand ghosts over Gypsum’s scout launcher, and he pauses. Frowns. 

“They did not tell me it would…” he begins, only to trail off as he pulls the scout and its warptech from the corpse’s shoulder. He can make out the little four-legged shape of the scout. It’s well-designed, he thinks. Hardy. It could probably survive the collapse of the universe. 

And it’s… moving. A mechanism within it is spinning, and clicking, like the interface of a slide reel. Gypsum had said it had a camera, hadn’t they? Is it malfunctioning?

Isgra pulls the scout free, standing and holding it toward the light of the lantern. The camera—a small black dot in its cylindrical casing—rotates to face him. Quiets. Then bursts into a series of clicks so aggressive that Isgra nearly drops the machine. 

He looks over his shoulder at Gypsum’s body. There is no possible way he can properly equip the launcher; his shoulders are too broad, and his antler prevents any illusion of being able to don the helmet and see whatever readings the scout is trying to send back. 

He needs to take it back to the reservoir, though. Needs to use it to find the coordinates of the Eye Signal Blocker. 

It clicks again. Slower, this time. If Isgra didn’t know better, he would think it was—

Singing.

He does drop the scout this time. Frozen in place, he stares at it—at—

“Gypsum?” he yelps. 

The scout clicks and turns in a delighted circle, and Isgra collapses into a heap on the wooden floor, laughing. 

***

Being a robot is kind of frustrating. 

Gypsum hadn’t realized quite how useful thumbs were until they don’t have them anymore. And don’t get them started on legs. Legs were really a great invention by their early ancestors, they think. Far better than whatever Slate was thinking when they programmed the data link between the ship’s log and the Little Scout to open constantly.

In Slate’s favor, they probably weren’t thinking about some hypothetically impossible scenario where a brainwave copy of their most annoying student uploaded themselves into the data transfer system by force. Rookie move. If they had a chance over at the universe, they’d definitely look into how the fuck that could even happen. 

They miss having a tongue. They could chatter about alien dataframes being compatible to Little Scout matrixes because they were based off Nomai light refinement systems, who must’ve somehow based their systems on the owlks. Had a Nomai clan met a Stranger on their original homeworld eons ago? Had the knowledge been passed down and improved upon so much that its origin was forgotten?

Isgra probably wouldn’t know anyway. But they can’t ask, because they’re a robot now. 

It’s fucked up. First a time loop, then a simulation ghost, and now this? Well, at least they have a chance to see the Eye of the Universe this way. 

Isgra is standing, holding them under his arm, in the doorway of the receiver room for the Eye Signal Blocker. He’s been very still for a very long time. Too long, in Gypsum’s humble opinion. They shutter the scout’s camera pointedly. 

Isgra startles. “Ah. Yes. It appears we are here,” he says, stepping into the space.

Gypsum rotates their camera. The room looks mostly the same as it had when they’d come here before the end of the universe. There’s the stairwell, the snaking wires, the destroyed control mechanism—

Oh. Right. They feel like an asshole, suddenly. An asshole robot that can’t give their friend a hug after he was slapped in the face by the view of exactly where he’d been standing when he made the choice he’s been suffering the consequences ever since. They click again. Isgra pats the scout on its metal frame idly, and Gypsum senses it through the built in surface integrity sensors. 

“The readings are still being received,” Isgra says. He lifts the scout to eye level, and Gypsum pivots the camera so they can view the reception screen. It still blinks a warning of broken connection. The wires and projector above it still pulse with green light. 

And as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, Isgra reaches up and flicks something. Gypsum manages to spin the camera just in time to see the projector rotating within its casing. Bits of that scribbling, unfamiliar language appear in the margins of the screen. Gypsum takes as many pictures as they can. What the hell. 

“They are coordinates,” Isgra says, a little awkwardly. It must be strange for him, talking to Gypsum when they, usually so animated, can’t speak back. Well, it’s strange for Gypsum too. 

“You said that the Scout could… communicate with your ship.”

Gypsum blinks the shutter once. 

“Is that a yes?”

Gypsum blinks again. This is going to be even more annoying than the vision torch…

“But it would destroy the internal mechanisms of the Scout.” Isgra’s decayed feathers flutter around his mouth as he grimaces, looking back at the screen. He traces a claw across it. In the scout’s snapshot camera images, it’s like watching a slide reel. Like Gypsum is still piecing together the past. 

“We will not, then,” Isgra declares.

He’s delusional. It’s the trauma, probably. Gypsum flutters the camera in distaste. 

“If your consciousness is at all linked to the mechanisms of this machine—” Isgra taps the casing of the Scout— “it is too much of a risk to compromise it. Even for later comfort. I will… fly manually.”

Gypsum hates being a robot, they decide. Not having arms to wave in disbelief at an idiot is the worst curse the universe could’ve given them. Who knows how far the Stranger has moved on the residual velocity of that first burst of solar power? How many years it could take to navigate the deadened universe toward those damnable coordinates? Gypsum is a good pilot, but they trained for years on Timber Hearth, and even then they had a tendency to misalign their orbit trajectories without help from—

Wait. 

They can control the Little Scout, but only because the absolute memory overhaul that is their consciousness is being supported by the ship log’s hardware as well. Could they manipulate the log, too? They fumble around with their robot ‘senses’ for a moment. Nothing comes of it but turning off the Scout’s light suddenly enough to make Isgra yelp in surprise. 

Perhaps they’re too far away. The log only boots up fully with the activation of a user, after all. Gypsum turns the Scout’s light back on and hopes that Isgra was paying attention to their lessons on Hearthian tech operation. 

Isgra sets the Scout down and begins study of the readings from the screen. He makes sure to give the camera a reasonable view of the room, which is appreciated. Gypsum clicks another picture and wishes Slate had given this hunk of metal any sort of image storage capacity. They can’t cross reference for shit. They don’t even have eyes. 

Being a robot sucks. 

***

Isgra hasn’t had to juggle coordinates in a very long time. 

When they’d left the homeworld, decimated in the shadow of their dream, every owlk had been taught to program, to calculate trajectories, to project velocities and orbits. They were a spacefaring species now, after all. Every one of them an astronaut. 

Isgra remembers, blearily, that he’d loved the puzzle of it all back then. It wasn’t in owlk nature to specialize, or to recognize the specific strengths of others, but he’d known he was proficient at it. His family members sought his attention for confirmation and teamwork. Cicado’s ancient father, when he’d yet lived, had thanked Isgra once for his contributions to getting the ship safely between solar systems. 

It’s like stretching an atrophied muscle, now. But every little movement is doing the same, so he sets his jaw against the discomfort of feathers and scales and bones and focuses. 

The coordinates of the signal craft mean nothing if Isgra cannot also determine the location of the mothership. In a burst of poor forward anticipation, the system had based itself entirely off of the now-destroyed location of the owlk homeworld, not itself. Once the ship was in Gypsum’s solar system, the sun had become a reasonable reference frame. Calibrating mothership measurements to it had become a calculation so second-nature that no one had bothered to write it down. Which became a problem when, millenia later, Isgra had forgotten the specific coordinates of the sun. 

It becomes a project, broken up by the unfamiliar need to leave the dark hut and graze to keep his new—old?—body operational. His consciousness is a haze of aching discomfort and single-minded focus. Gypsum punctuates his calculations with idle clicking, and Isgra does his best to keep them updated by speaking aloud. It’s more difficult than it should be. Usually, he is the one listening with one ear to Gypsum’s ongoing narration of situations. 

Three days, it takes, for Isgra to confidently predict their distance. He sits back, frowning at the numbers he’s scrawled into the dust and the light of the screen. Slowly, he asks Gypsum, “how fast does your vessel accelerate?” 

He’d briefly considered commandeering one of the Stranger’s dinghies, which Gypsum had described as still being stowed in both airlocks. That idea disappeared alongside the autopilot concept as soon as he realized his friend’s consciousness had been caught inside their Hearthian technology. He would remain as close to it as he could, until they found the end. 

The Scout clicks frustratedly. Isgra hums, and stands. He moves so he’s within view of the camera, curling his claws. 

“You use a base ten system, you told me,” he says. Though the Hearthians had only three fingers, their numbering was similar to five-clawed owlks. When he’d asked why, Gypsum had just shrugged.  

“Ten’s a cool number,” they’d said. “We like ten.”

“And your length units—approximately the length of your arm when outstretched.”

The Scout clicks excitedly. Gypsum is catching on. 

“So, with a unit of Hearthian-arm per second squared, what is the first digit of your acceleration?”

They continue with this line of questioning. Unit conversions prove the most difficult, consistently. A Hearthian year is different than that which Isgra automatically associates—extending to days, and even a slight variation in the length of what they consider a ‘second’. But together, they determine a maximum velocity Isgra can reach while retaining enough fuel to decelerate and navigate to the Eye upon reaching the signal blocker. Isgra calculates the years it will take. The supplies he will need. It’s a daunting volume. 

Gypsum clicks something. Shook out of his reverie, Isgra glances over at the little robot. It’s still a shock to be thinking of Gypsum and see the Scout. He supposes it must take Gypsum aback as well, to see Isgra as… this. Half a corpse, kept upright by sheer determination. 

“I agree,” Isgra says, smiling a bit. “You are talkative.”

The Scout spins its camera. It’s like watching Gypsum roll their eyes, and Isgra interprets it as such. 

“I shall endeavor to investigate your ship,” Isgra tells it. “Perhaps your own supplies will assist when I develop rations and waste disposal for the journey.” 

That earns him an excited series of clicks. Isgra bundles their supplies back into the backpack he’d removed from Gypsum’s corpse. It still feels… wrong to hold. But he needs something to protect the scout launcher, the modified signalscope, the Nomai warp core. Lifting the Scout onto his shoulder, he sets out. 

Though he’s already in the reservoir, it’s not easy to navigate to the docking bay. Every time his claws slip even slightly, he has the lancing image of his broken body drifting down the river. Leaving the universe empty of life. Leaving Gypsum trapped as a desperate piece of code for all eternity. 

He’s very careful. He’s exceedingly careful, to the point he starts to annoy the impatient robot on his shoulder. Still, when he finally climbs into the tunnel that had connected to the dam, he’s intact. The warp core leaves a black and purple smudge of light on the fabric of the rucksack. 

The space suits remain where he remembers. When owlk attention had turned away from the Eye and toward the simulation, all spacefaring ventures had been forgotten. But Isgra recalls the day he’d tucked away the suit made for his measurements for the last time, the way his fingers had lingered before he shut the wooden door over the silvery metal and projector canvas. 

The suits are covered in dust. A few, time has begun to eat through. Claws curled, Isgra is careful to touch the suits of the deceased as little as possible. 

His own is easy to distinguish. The helmet is molded to accommodate his broken antler. He remembers teasing, back and and forth, about its silly asymmetry with his family, and he smiles slightly as he pulls the suit into his hands. 

He freezes. 

Millenia are a long time to forget. A long time to be forgotten. But something of history is always left behind, and there, stitched in careful black thread on the patch that would fall over Isgra’s heart, is a name. 

He stares at it for a long, long while. He does not breathe until the burn in his chest forces him. 

Then he exhales, and hears Gypsum click in curious question. He covers the patch with his claws. Carefully, purposefully, he tears it free. 

“It’s nothing,” he tells Gypsum. “Just something I’d forgotten.”

Isgra was paying attention when Gypsum had told him about Hearthian tech, and it might just save the universe. 

If they had teeth to grind, they’d have worn them down to dust as Isgra circles their ship with careful, calculated confusion. Seeing the beautiful old thing is like seeing the dawn over the Timber Hearth horizon—warm and familiar and full of possibility. For Gypsum, at least. Isgra seems entirely too cautious. 

The Scout itself warms at the sight of safety. The ship’s hull is still shining dull bronze in the cold light of the Stranger’s airlock. The wooden landing gear has decayed visibly. Still, it supports the ship’s weight, with its metallic wings and thrusters, boxes and tanks and filtration systems. The ship’s satellite, resting atop the hull like a jaunty hat, loyally receives incoming data from the Scout. And waits for signals from home. 

Isn’t it incredible? Gypsum wants to ask. Wants to look at Isgra and grin, wants to point out every ingenious development Slate had made to the design since the last liftoff. Wants to see Isgra, who’s species’ inventions Gypsum has been interfering with for years, look upon the achievements of one who came after. 

Gypsum wants to see him proud. 

Not that it matters, at the end of the universe, that things have changed. Or maybe now, it matters the most it ever could.

 Isgra pads around the circumference of the ship, squinting at the humming purple lines of the gravity stairway. It takes him an exhaustingly long time to risk reaching out to touch it. Gypsum would’ve laughed at his shocked little hoot as he feels the reverse force against his arm if they could. 

Cautiously, Isgra steps into the stairwell. He almost gets wedged in the entryway on the way up—which would have been very funny—but unfortunately he hunches his shoulders just in time. 

The Scout shuts off its light automatically when the hatch seals behind them in the ship. The warm, comforting overheads click on in welcome. Gypsum thinks about taking off their helmet and gulping in great gasps of clear air here, on loops where they’d raced across the whole of the Ember Twin trying to get back before they ran out of oxygen. They think of desperately navigating into the safety of the ship in the moments before the gravity of Giant’s Deep sucked them back down beneath the cloud layer, breaking their bones against the twisted roots of a falling island. They think of stumbling inside for a granola bar as the last morning of the loop dawned. They think of watching the blue light of a supernova through the tinted windshield, pure and unafraid. 

Ready to get this beauty off the ground?

Maybe some parts of being a robot are okay. Exhibit A, you can’t cry embarrassingly in front of your only living friend in a dead universe if you have no tear ducts. 

Isgra has to stoop nearly in half as he navigates the space, taking in the flight controls and the maps and the supplies. He reaches out to set the Scout on its perch. Then, claws blackened in their age and frostbite, he taps the screen of the ship log. 

The proud logo of the Outer Wilds Ventures disappears. And like stepping into the sucking force of a black hole, Gypsum finds their coded self elsewhere. 

It’s like—they don’t know what it’s like. Like suddenly stumbling between bodies only to find yourself in possession of a dozen more limbs, maybe. Like transferring into the simulation only to realize you’ve lost your signalscope and your translator and your jetpack, just in reverse. 

They know everything, suddenly. Know the exact health of the reactor core, the precise volume of fuel remaining in the ship’s tanks. They can carefully flutter through their own notes, written so deeply into the same metal that had forged the Ash Twin Project’s power wires that not even time could erase it. They can see photos of old sites they’d nearly forgotten. They can listen to recordings of music they’ve only heard in dreams for years. They can even access Slate’s programming comments, hidden within the software from every angle but this one. 

### future Slate: fix the retro rockets. Really. I’m not kidding this time. 

### newbies’ flying skills just ain’t what they used to be, so I guess I’ve gotta make an autopilot program. I blame Gossan. They’re too soft on the babies. And nice, and patient, and funny and shit. Damn them. 

### im drukn too mcuh sap winee. wheeeee this’s goning to work so good. fuck you hornfells 

### could we repurpose one of these oxygen tanks to a secondary combustion chamber? Pseudocalcs to follow.

### is it a good idea to have the Scout and the ships log wired up to the same mainframe? Absolutely not. Am I going to do it anyway to save programming time because I like to cut corners? Absolutely. Gossan, if you’re reading this, someone who wasn’t Slate wrote this. 

“Nomais’ beard, Slate,” Gypsum thinks, a little tearfully. “You absolute maniac.” 

The Scout picks up a sharp hoot of surprise from Isgra, feeding it through the mainframe to ship log—and now Gypsum. It also picks up a voice. Hal’s voice, as had been recorded for the autopilot when it was first implemented, brokenly voicing Gypsum’s own thoughts. 

“Holy shit,” the autopilot says. “Fucking—you can hear me. I can control this thing? I can control this thing!”

“Gypsum?” Isgra says with the same disbelief they’d spoken with in the ritual room above Gypsum’s corpse. Which Gypsum is not thinking about, thank you very much. They’ve had enough corpse discussion for all time, as far as they’re concerned. 

“Isgra!” Gypsum crows through Hal’s stilted, automated voice. There’s no recorded version of the word, so it has to be constructed through a poorly optimized sounding algorithm. When it’s pronounced wrong, Gypsum decides to blame Hal. 

“I—you’re really here,” Isgra says with a grin. “I almost thought I was imagining a personality for your dear Little Scout.”

“Nah. You’ve gone insane in other ways.”

Isgra rolls his eyes. “You flatter me, as always.” Folding himself further, he moves a little closer to the ship log. “Are you alright?”

“Well, I’m a robot. I’ve been worse though.” Gypsum whirs in hesitation before daring to ask, “and, ah, what about you? You look like something I’d tell to scare hatchlings around a campfire.”

Isgra raises his arms, glancing down at himself as best he can in the cramped space. “I do not believe I have been worse. Physically, at least.” He chuckles, and there’s a shred of forced mirth behind it. 

“Yeah, buddy. Does it, ah, hurt?”

“I believe so. I have not been able to experience this kind of discomfort for a long time, though, so I am unpracticed at noticing and processing it.”

So he’s just compartmentalizing the agony of being alive when he shouldn’t be. That sounds incredibly healthy. 

“I’m sorry.”

“It is not your fault.” 

“It kind of is.” This whole insanity was their plan, after all. 

Isgra just taps the screen and shakes his head. “You blame yourself often,” he notes, “for things you had no control over.”

Gypsum would laugh, if they had the programmed capability to do so. “I’ve been told I give myself too much credit.”

“Agreed.” Isgra gestures to the ship. “So, can you calculate…?”

“Way ahead of you,” Isgra says. The log is equipped to perform most of the heavy astronomical work that an astronaut might need on the fly— ha—but Gypsum is just as incapable as the ship log itself at creating data. 

“I can figure out how far things are and how much fuel shit will take to reach, all that,” Gypsum says, “but I can’t program anything in without external data. You could manually enter coordinates, though. We’ll just have to translate them into the Hearthian system.”

“And that’s possible?” Isgra’s eyes glow with hope.

“You bet your feathered forehead that’s possible,” Gypsum replies, flashing the ship’s lights as they laugh. “Let’s do this.”

***

On the second day of preparations, Isgra pulls a can from the upper storage shelves of Gypsum’s ship. And though the rest of his life will be very short, he’s about to have it changed forever. 

“What is this?” he says, frowning at the nonsense words on the label. Gypsum had taught him most of the basics of the Hearthian language. But they’d focused on flight terms and technical jargon, things he would need to understand to pilot the ship and interact with its interfaces. The words he sounds out from the can mean nothing to him. “J… jumbo m-marsh…”

The ship log lights up blindingly. “You’ve never had a fucking marshmallow before?”

“I have never even heard of this.”

“For shame!” Though the recorded voice lacks emotion, the flickering of the ships lights and the word choice communicates Gypsum’s judgment just fine. “Marshmallows are like, built out of joy. And home. You’ve gotta try one.”

“Alright,” Isgra says hesitantly. He’s learned how to open cans by now. Much to Gypsum’s envy, he can even do it quite deftly with his claws. 

Inside the can are tightly packed white lumps. They look like river foam shaped into squat cylinders. It’s not particularly appealing—at least until the scent reaches Isgra’s ancient nostrils. It’s sweet and soft. He blinks. “Oh.”

He reaches into the can to scoop out a marshmallow, but Gypsum interrupts. “What are you doing?”

Isgra pauses. Squints at the computer screen. “Er. Doing as you suggested?”

“No, no, you don’t eat them raw,” Gypsum says. “You roast them.”

“What?” 

“Over a fire. Stab them with a stick and roast! I like mine kind of golden brown, but Gabbro burns the hell out of theirs. Says they like the crispiness.” 

“Oh.” Isgra frowns at the can.

Then he stands up and returns to the mothership proper. In the middle of their impossible preparations for the last stand of a dead universe, a zombie owlk and a robot take a break to roast marshmallows. They are nothing less than the best things Isgra has ever tasted. 

***

They take off, though neither of them knows it, twenty-two thousand Hearthian days after the end of the universe.

The misty opening of the airlock yawns. The joystick is small as a toy in a careful owlk’s hand. The map is navigated by the stubborn consciousness of a Hearthian that has died too many times for it to stick. The roof droops with the weight of dried grass and cultivated plants. Oxygen is as beautiful as gold, and an apocalypse reaches out to the last ship of hope with kind hands. 

They take off, the sound of thrusters a drumbeat through time made meaningless. The Stranger slinks behind the final embrace of darkness, where it had always yearned to be, and falls alone through space. It creaks a final goodbye. No one looks back to mourn it. 

Somewhere in the outer wilds, an Eye opens. 

Months passed very slowly in a cage. 

They pass very slowly in a graveyard, too. 

***

“You called them your family,” Gypsum wonders, once, as Isgra lies on the floor of the ship. It’s the only position in which he can fully extend his spine. He should sleep—there are six hours scheduled into the flight pattern to account for it—but they both know he isn't trying.

"Yes," Isgra says. "We are all kin. We were." 

"Did you know them all very well, then? Before they betrayed you?" 

It is in honor to the dead when he says, "it was I who betrayed them, Gypsum." 

A scrap of metal and wood tumbles toward the heart of dreams. The ship log hums. It is quiet when it says, "no it wasn't." 

Lies don't matter at the end of the universe. All they have left is the dark and the weight of truth. 

***

Forgotten lines of code in digital space systems don't eat. Gypsum is jealous of Isgra for it. Isgra, who has eaten tough grass and marshmallows for a torturously long time, is jealous of Gypsum for it. 

"I still wish I could have one more marshmallow before I die for real," Gypsum complains. "I didn't appreciate them enough when I had taste buds." 

"You can have them," Isgra moans. He swallows the lump of sugar stubbornly all the same. His diet has turned him to even more of a wraith than usual. 

"You'll just have to appreciate them for me," Gypsum teases. "So stop all your whining." 

"They are delicious. Just not… the hundredth time." 

"I beg to differ. There's nothing like a marshmallow at the end of another grueling time loop."

Isgra chuckles. "I thought I instructed you to stop using 'Nomai technology' as a thesis to win arguments." 

"Press your advantage!" the computer chirps. “It's the Hearthian way.”

Scout camera rotating idly on an old, familiar shelf, Gypsum files away the light as it falls colorlessly through the ship. It glances off the metallic edges of packed cans. Of oxygen canisters. Of the broken artifact Isgra had scooped dirt and grass into to house Gypsum’s emergency tree seeds.

“Do you really think we’ll die for real?” Isgra asks. Gypsum understands; they haven’t, all the other times.

“Everything else has ended,” is Gypsum’s reply. “I suppose we have to, too.”

Isgra hums. He’s silent for a moment. The ship slips quietly through an empty void, and the stars are just memories to be imagined on the canvas. 

He says, “Are you looking forward to it?”

Gypsum doesn’t answer. They don’t have to. 

***

Isgra teaches the ship log, or his friend, or some impossible amalgamation of them both, how to swear in owlk. In the end, neither of them can make the sounds properly. But it feels good to laugh. 

***

A robot cannot get nightmares.

“I used to,” Gypsum says, “in the simulation. Layers of unreality, I guess.”

“Hm,” replies Isgra. He is, once again, not sleeping. Instead, he huddles against the warm base of the ship log computer, his claws scraping across the surface of the metal batteries. They’re shaking. His eyes are pressed half closed with pain. 

He’s learning how to feel it again. It’s the price of living, for the beauty of the universe. 

“What did you dream about?”

Gypsum flashes the hull lights in what has become their imitation of a laugh. “All sorts of shit, Isgra. It’s not a very good bedtime story.”

“It’s a story,” Isgra rasps.

Gypsum has nothing to say to that, for a very long moment. After all, what haven’t the two of them sacrificed, so that every story might be told? What haven’t they given, because they believe it’s deserved? 

But it’s the end of the universe. Surely they deserve to remember it with joy. 

“Once, my friend Marl fell out of the tree in the middle of our village,” Gypsum says. “It was a pretty regular day, except for the radioactive snails…”

***

14.3 billion years. A fraction more to go.

***

Isgra finds he loves reading Gypsum’s old notes in the ship log. 

His kind had never learned much about the other bodies in orbit around the sun they had journeyed to. It was as though they became implicated in the Eye’s deception; unworthy of inspection, understanding, or compassion. But they are fascinating, from Gypsum’s descriptions. Each a wonder of the universe hiding history and mystery. 

He wishes he’d had the chance to visit them. To feel the hurricanes of Giant’s Deep ruffle his feathers. To reach out and run his claws through the falling sand on the Ember Twin. To leap into black holes and drift through starlit space. To watch the treetops from the craters on Timber Hearth and hear the instruments of Gypsum’s home. 

Perhaps he is glad he’ll never know the length of an anglerfish’s teeth in person, though. 

Reading the log’s notes, Isgra can hear Gypsum aging within their words. It’s a little sad, and a little fond. With each loop, Gypsum changed. Though this time never passed in an objective reference frame, it seems very real to Isgra now. 

He learns to love the Nomai as Gypsum had. Hears their story second hand and mourns them, delights in them, wishes he could learn from them. When Gypsum tells him that they’d spoken to a living Nomai, adrift in time atop the quantum moon that orbits the Eye of the Universe, Isgra feels a little giddy.

“She was incredible,” Gypsum says wistfully. “She had all these questions for me that I couldn’t answer, but she didn’t hesitate to find a way to answer mine.”

“Do you think she knew eternity? Like I did?” Isgra asks.

“Maybe,” Gypsum hums. “It’s all different, on the quantum moon. But I think Solanum would’ve thought eternity was a gift, if it meant she brought anyone closer to her dream.”

“She seems like someone I would like to meet.”

Gypsum flashes the cool lights of the ship log, and Isgra can almost imagine the solar system projected on the walls. “Maybe you will,” they say. “Anything’s possible now, right?”

***

### Good news, my genius invention. You have a pilot. Stars help us all, cuz they finally passed Gypsum through flight training. 

***

“Why us?” Isgra croaks into this tiny bubble of light. This cage, this simulation in the nothingness, this self. 

He feels as though his body is tearing to pieces. As though his aged organs are failing in his chest a moment too soon. As though he is watching the vault doors close in front of him a final, world-ending time, and he will never again live the life he’d wished for.

“I don’t know,” the voice that doesn’t sound like Gypsum says. It’s so cold. Is there really a soul in there, somewhere? Is there really a soul left anywhere?

The walls press in like falling canyons. His lungs are their own supernova, razing everything in his chest to dust. How had he ever thought that he was brave? 

“I don’t know,” Isgra whispers back. “I don’t know what I would do, if I could do it over again.”

***

“I’d ask Gabbro to help me.”

***

“I’d tell my mother—I’d tell her I only ever wanted her to remember me well.”

***

“I’d apologize to Slate. Maybe they really would’ve fallen in love, if I hadn’t been so clumsy.”

***

“I’d ruin everything so much sooner.”

“No, wait—who knows who would’ve heard you, then? Who knows if the Nomai would ever have come looking?”

***

“Who knows if I’d ever have met you?”

***

Time only gives you one chance, in the end. 

“Isgra. Isgra wake up, wake the hell up.”

Isgra jerks awake, rough breath carding through his parched throat. He’d had to start rationing the recycled water. But he can’t remember the last time he’d ever felt like himself, so it is hardly more than distracting. He pushes himself to his feet. His antler scrapes the low roof of the ship, and he grimaces.

“What?”

The lights of the cabin are flashing, irregular and confusing. “Isgra.”

It isn’t Gypsum flashing. It isn’t the ship at all.

Like a fawn on its first legs, like the oldest being in the universe, Isgra stumbles to the cockpit. The thrusters of the ship are humming. Dictating direction, dictating distance, dictating time—but it doesn’t matter. Suddenly, nothing matters at all.

There, crackling with energy like thunder, curled to pounce like a predator, is the Eye of the Universe.

Isgra’s heart isn’t beating, anymore. His cells hang in frozen weightlessness. There is nothing, in an eternal instant, between himself and the truth. He looks at the singing storm that has waited past what should’ve been the final moments of an entire reality for something to witness it, and he feels the weight of history lift.

There is nothing he can regret anymore. There is nothing left at all.

***

It is silence. No—it is the breath they take each time they sit up in their sleeping bag. It is the time it takes Chert to lift his hand to strike the drum. It is the swipe of Gabbro’s paintbrush across a quantum woodland. It is the inhale before Feldspar’s harmonica hums. It is the resonance of a banjo note and the parting of lips before the whistle, the click of the seatbelt before the thrusters, the silence before the grip of Giant’s Deep. It is Solanum dead and reaching for the stars. It is crystalline fragments of stars in the sky. 

  I did it for you, Gypsum thinks. 

This is for you. With your breath, I sing. 

***

Isgra pilots a ship that isn’t his into a dream that is. 

The thunder envelopes them like the wave of a broken dam, and the oil-slick stone reflects the drone of everything, all at once, back in on itself. It is a daunting, impossible thing. A force so great Isgra cannot understand the hubris of the tiny, owl-antlered machine that circles it, swallowing its voice like it has any power in this story. Like it is anything but something ungrateful for the gift it was given. 

Isgra is ungrateful. Isgra is young, and will never be given the chance to grow old, and Isgra is ancient, and will never be given the chance to unlearn. But stars, the Eye of the Universe sings, and it sounds like wonder. 

“Are you ready?” Isgra howls over the moan of the cosmos outside their window. 

The ship log, a testament to one being’s eternal stubbornness, displays the image of a campfire as it pulses to the rhythm of lightning. Gypsum speaks with the voice of a childhood friend and the cadence of the technology that has saved them. 

“We could go back!” they reply. Because someone has to say it. “We could pretend!”

Isgra smiles. In software and lingering sunlight, he knows Gypsum is doing the same. 

“We’re already pretending,” he says.

“I’m ready.”

Above them, beneath them, around them—a black eclipse. It swallows light and sound. The pull of it is deeper than gravity, reaching out to the ship with fingers of swirling stone.

“Three.”

The thruster is the wrong size for his curling claws. All his life, he has felt the wrong size. The wrong soul. He does not feel wrong now. He is terrified, and he cannot go back to the dark. 

“Two.”

The ship falls to pieces around him. A cyclone of violet thunderclouds tears him down to his suit and his feathers and the memories he’s lived so long without treasuring. He closes his eyes, falling into the center of the storm. He can see Gypsum behind his eyelids. Their body is spun from lightning and old stone, and they open their own eyes. Four brilliant orange irises, the color of the sun before it dies, fix themselves on the universe as it Looks back. 

Isgra cannot bare to see. He is not brave, in the moments where his spirit is shrapnel and his home never meant anything. He craves only light. All he ever craved was light, and buoyed by the song of thunder, he has it. There is an instrument in his hands, but there is nothing in Gypsum’s. 

They were not born for this. They have no destiny, not in a dying world. They were in the right place at the right time—but they were kind, and they questioned, and they lifted the mantle of an extinct peoples’ dream onto their own shoulders. Nothing was meant to be. Nothing is ever meant to be. It is only ever forged. 

It is Gypsum that reaches out to the flames. Gypsum, that stares into the heart of the dying sun with a camera and a signalscope and a tiny black hole strapped to their chest, ready to understand. 

They Know. He Trusts. 

“One.”

The Eye howls, and then there is silence. 

THREE

You were born from hard walls and soft skin. When you looked upon everything time had built for you, you were unsatisfied. You were never grateful, never pleased. And your family laughed and told you they were the same. We are all the same. 

There is something out there, waiting for you.

All the answers sit in neat plaques, silent planks the creak of hollow bones under your footsteps. You are still not satisfied. 

Constellations hang on tree branches and you do not know what is closer—

Your heart or its believer? 

blue. and white. and the warm, warm embers of a campfire. 

if I told you that I had hands of stone and eyes of steel, you would not believe me. in me, you would see cracks, and you would fill them with questions. 

In the structures of your old life

are patterns never reached. Mother

father

brother

lover, 

do they wish you would come home?

Fear is like another puzzle, on the canvas you made

to find the truth. 

why do we look

upon the stars that we will never reach?

why tell stories when they will bring us

nothing

only knowledge that we may wish we never had.

You do not regret the stars, even when you burn

There is something of dreams, spread between tree branches. There is something of peace, to be content with not knowing. 

There is something of love. It can be written in any order, but you understand its meaning. 

to hear a story

to scream from a nightmare

to think

those came before you

are brave.

Look into the teeth and do not flinch. what is death

in the face of a life well lived?

You dig his grave for the ones you leave behind, now. It is not always so wonderful, to understand. The cosmos is careless, when it kills. A world is made to bleed and heal. 

Family. Idols. Enemies. 

Gone, with the exhale of your shuddering breath.

It is yourself next. It is everything next—but it is only fair. You had your chance to learn, and you used it well. This is not a game to be won, just a friend, impossible and singing, to be appreciated while you are here. 

You did well. Join us.

we are not the only ones who seek. 

we would not have made it here alone.

Have you ever heard this song before? 

it is more beautiful

than the laugh

of a child with a dream. 

how long has it been

     since i learned

         the smell of pine trees

             are different than i envisioned

                 you cut it close, but

                     even if it’s over

                          i was honored to be part of it.

FOUR

Lantern lit with blue fire, a conscious observer looks up at the stars.

“Do you hear that?” they ask. 

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I want to find out.”