The Soul Star ⭐️ The Great Void
The Flight of the Chronus
The Thin Pink Line
For a while the blue pulse made Antiny think he was getting somewhere. Yet when it disappeared, he dug back into writing stories to console himself for the quenching of that tiny light.
Antiny had long ago realized that his stories didn’t make any sense, at least not in any practical way. It was as if they came from a faraway realm where the things he imagined could somehow make sense. It was this hope that drove him through sextillions of leagues of darkness, delving ever-deeper into the Great Void.
It was a desperate hope, because if he and his cobalt planet of Antigua were all that floated in the endless Void of space, then it didn’t make any difference if he drifted for sextillion years, or if he multiplied sextillion by sextillion; he would still be making up things that had no substance, no chance to be felt or lived. Above all, he dreaded the phrase his father often used to dismiss his dreaming son: They’re only stories, nothing more.
Then he saw something else: a small pink line, no more than a scratch on the great black canvas of space. The pink scratch suggested once again that there might be life somewhere in the cosmos. The pink line also came from the same direction as the blue pulse. This was promising. It thrilled him to think that the entirety of existence didn’t consist of a cobalt planet on which life rose from the dust and fell to the dust over and over again, pulsing into a reincarnation that was also a broken line in time, leading only to its own glorious and brutally isolated fate. Now there might be Something Else! Now more than ever he dared to hope that the stories that surfaced within him came from somewhere, from something. In a burst of joyful anticipation, Antiny sent out one simple hopeful cobalt pulse in the direction of the small pink line he saw on his screen.
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LGB 822
On the main deck of the inter-ovular explorer Chronus, Looking-Glass Being 822 had never seen anything like it. And that was a fairly significant fact, given that LGB 822 had made his way across all 216 Cosmic Eggs. He had also drifted out into the Great Void further than any Looking-Glass Being in the history of time.
LGB 822 saw the pinprick of dark blue light beam from a tiny blue ship that was lit for a fraction of a second and then disappeared. The dot of blue light got steadily larger and was headed in the general direction of the Chronus.
The dot became a pulsating circle, wide as a planet and within it LGB 822 saw a palimpsest topography, forms by the trillions, pulsing ever wider until they reached the Chronus and swallowed it whole.
The pulse then contracted, like the hope on Antiny’s face, and disappeared into nothingness. Antiny couldn’t retract or undo the pulse, since it was a one-directional Greeting, stuffed with all the good tidings and inter-alien bonhomie Antiny could fit into a single cobalt pulse.
As LGB 822 and his spaceship was about to be swallowed, he thought about an enormous serpent swallowing an egg. Just before disappearing, he had time to transmit this image to the commander of the Albinon.
The comander smiled wryly, and thought to himself, That 822, always with the visual poetry! and went back to his star charts.
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Next: 💚 The English Garden
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