Silence. The silence of the grave. An elephant graveyard. Ships, thousands of them, rent and broken, littered the horizon, their gaping hulls opening unto dead and silenced command centers, lightless computers manned by the remnants of nameless crews, charred, organic remains, preserved now in this perfect vacuum. Engines torn open, their plasma long ago exhausted in brilliant plumes. I had seen the recordings, how the green pillars leapt up to devour friend and enemy alike.
There was a strange beauty to those images, like the aurora of Earth’s poles. There was a strange beauty here too, amid the silent monuments of dead warships. Great heaps of metal lay where they fell, and intricate byways had formed between the wreckage. Unplanned lines zigzagged in labyrinthine passages of unchanging shadows.
Unchanging, for the light here never moved; an ever-promised dawn never broke the twilight.
He looked down at the readout on his wrist, took a few steps toward the left, and looked again. His helmeted head bent; turning the dark glass of his visor from point to point about his feet, he searched. Then, finally, a gleam caught his eye, and he knelt down. A thickly gloved hand struggled a moment, but finally scooped up the red jewel into its palm.
The man stood, lifting the gleaming gem between thumb and forefinger up into one of the static beams of light streaming through a perforated wall of metal. It glowed with a bloodlike sheen, its heart pulsing with liquid fire.
The light passing through, transformed and redirected, pierced shadows that had stood undisturbed for centuries with a ruddy brilliance. The man in the spacesuit did not turn to see the thing scowling in the sanguine light. His eyes were only on his treasure.
He saw only its light; it was the last light he ever saw.
Psst! Hey kid, wanna buy a book?
Tale Told 