"A mother thinks about her children like an oar to a canoe. Children think of their mother like the Buddha who turns his back."
---Khmer proverb
The city was a mausoleum of sand-carved eulogies, its wide ceremonial promenades turned ossuaries of stillness. The air, if it could still be called that, bore the brittle scent of silicate decay and dried excretions of moss-like vegetation struggling to reclaim the ornamental stone. Sandstone towers, pagoda-like and fluted with ancient sigils, stood half-dissolved in the slow abrasion of unrelenting wind. Lichen bloomed in funerary greens across once-gleaming reliefs—mythical beasts twisted mid-battle, lunar saints with too many limbs holding scrolls, weapons, and sorrow.
The dust did not settle—it draped. Draped with the self-consciousness of ritual. Nothing here had collapsed, not exactly. It had curated its death.
Above it all, the sky oscillated without transition between the mineral bruises of amethyst and onyx—colors unnatural to any Terran atmospheric model. A few malignant stars blinked through, as if the cosmos itself had been infected with the same silence.
And yet movement—one sliver. One deviation.
A girl. Human, technically. Biometric reads would register Terran-standard mitochondria, no augmentation—at least none that modern scanners would detect. But to call her merely human would be akin to calling this city merely dead. She moved like an echo through the ruins—half-corporeal, half-refracted light. Her steps barely registered on the sand-etched stone: small, deliberate, disoriented.
Her robes—once regal in color and structure—were now soft ghosts of their former selves. Intricate dye patterns bled into threadbare tatters. Symbols sewn into the hem with metallized thread glinted faintly—sigils derived from a syntax not yet deciphered by any known xenoanthropologist. Not ancient. Out of phase.
Her veil was drawn low—not as concealment, but perhaps as penance. Or mourning. Or some nameless third function. Behind it, the glint of eyes: large, obsidian, too ancient for her body. A child’s frame carrying the weight of collapse.
She blinked slowly as she moved beneath the archways—broken dragon-lions poised mid-roar overhead, the claws eroded to nubs. She passed beneath them like a trespasser in a holy place, though her posture hinted at ownership. Or memory. Or both.
The city did not react. Nor did it need to. It had already won.
In her mind, every creak of metal was a monster’s breath. Every drone of wind was her own scream, caught on loop in a cave of her making. She had run when the others vanished—first from the machine-sounds, the tireless patrol of maintenance bots who cleaned dust no one cared about. Then from silence. Then from herself.
She stumbled once, caught herself. Her boots—if one dared call them that—were repurposed sections of textile armor, knotted with childlike effort into something walkable. They made a soft scraping on the stone, like a whispered apology.
And then the robot passed.
It was not menacing. That was the horror of it. Faded panels, outdated service patterns, diagnostic lights blinking in no urgent rhythm. It was indifferent. It had seen her, in the strictest technical sense, but not registered her. She was beneath its threshold. A non-object. In a city of ghosts, she had become one.
She greeted it anyway. A soft, trained gesture—palm down, fingers splayed. Peace. Service. Recognition. It did not respond. It continued along its pre-mapped route, scanning cracks, aligning boundary beacons that no longer broadcast. She watched it vanish like the rest of her world.
Her lips barely moved as she muttered—“I could sit, if I wanted to.” Not a threat. Not a comfort. A hypothesis.
Three days prior—if time still obeyed such logic here—she had chased beauty.
An insect, or something that mimicked one: iridescent, winged, shimmering with hard-spectrum photonics. It had hovered at the edge of the starship clearing, above the burned soil where the black-hulled ship had landed. Where the others—adults, indifferent—had lingered inside disused ziggurats of grey crystal, cataloguing what couldn’t be owned.
She had chased it with shrieks of delight. She had played. And then she had lost everything.
When she returned, the ship was gone. No warning, no exhaust bloom, no sonic aftermath. Just scorched earth and footpad craters. No log beacon, no emergency recall. She screamed for hours. Her voice dissolved into the fissures in the stones.
Now, three days into the silence, her thoughts no longer moved linearly. Her memory was not a string—it was a fog, breaking into sudden flashes and voices not her own.
That night, the music began.
Not machine-generated. Not acoustic in any technical sense. It started with a chime—flawed, fragile, like wind brushing a wire too thin to vibrate. She froze, listening, waiting for it to stop like all other things here. It didn’t. It grew.
She moved.
She fell.
She kept moving.
Through a gate of crumbling jade lions and shattered sigils, into a courtyard blooming with frost-flowers—called bulbflowers in her internal taxonomy. They pulsed in sequences like data streams translated into color and melody.
The flowers sang.
Their song was mathematical, yes. But also emotional, resonant. Hyperspectral tones layered on subharmonics. The girl touched them—each one responding in a unique harmonic key. A network. A choir. With each step, her language shifted. She replied. She spoke a nonsense dialect that came from nowhere, and yet belonged to the flowers.
They sang to her of home. Not her home. But a home. Close enough.
Her pain—psychic, chemical, cellular—dulled. Replaced.
She giggled. Then laughed. Then danced.
“I am Kira Nerys,” she said to them, because the name meant safety in her grandmother’s voice.
They accepted it.
She moved deeper into the glade. Fell once. Laughed again.
The flowers sang one final chorus—longer, fuller—and formed a bioluminescent ring around her. Their chiming slowed. She lay in their center, fingers splayed, smiling.
“Dream of us, little one,” they whispered.
Then the humans arrived.
They found her asleep in the forbidden garden of the city they had not mapped. They scanned her vitals. They locked her into containment.
They filed their reports.
They did not ask what she had become.
ns216.73.216.82da2
and then Add to home screen.