Onliest

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Between the stars, there are no seasons. Shadows of dead worlds drift in the void, but there is no laughter. Perhaps small nebulae, lit with their own faint fires, float without aim, but there are no voices. In the vast gulf—a gap far larger than the human mind can comprehend—perhaps wonders wait to be discovered. But not life.

Life does not spread through the cosmic distances. It roots itself on the microscopic worlds that hug the warm stars.

Life is a coward. It never ventures far from the blanket of the solar winds, and the dusting of magnetism that sparks the skies above its head.

Between the stars, there is only loneliness. And in time, madness.

This is a fact as constant as the tick of hydrogen spinning in its singular electron shell. Unalterable. Between the stars is death, and only fools aim to cross it.

The great starship Olorun launched, with its own teeming masses, toward another sun. Between the stars, beyond that border, loneliness gripped it. And then madness.

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