The Victorious Dark

Skyspark

The stars were going dark. She was sure of it.

For six days, now, she had spent her scant down time reclined in her observatory sling chair, scrutinizing the black sky's bottomless timbre, and she could say with absolute certainty that it was changing. Shifting. Sliding up and down octaves of fierce logic that crescendoed in one inescapable conclusion:

Every star was dying. All at once.

Crimson giants were curiously sputtering. Tiny, tremulous spheres still nebula-cradled had only just ignited fusion that was now misfiring. They were all gasping their last.

Even her star, that gorgeous creature beneath her feet, was burning 300 million Thermals hotter than made any sense. Millions of years early, its photosphere had bloomed against the pressure as it ate its fill—past helium ignition. Past carbon and oxygen.

FirstSphere would be thrilled. They would greedily take the heavier elements and never ask why it was happening. That was the way it worked back home: they had so many answers, they'd stopped asking questions, save The Question. The one they had shaken their heads to as she answered.

'A grazer?'

'You want to be a star grazer?'

In her first year of learning, she'd intuited the implications of spherically symmetric space-time and had continued to dazzle ever since; a mind like that would turn rancid trapped inside a grazer, living in solitude. 'Wasteful' and 'inefficient' were how they described it. She almost pointed out the redundancy but didn't want them to deny her application.

Grazers were dirty. Their skin was singed and cracked. Most went blind within a few thousand years. Anyone with ambitions of honoring FirstSphere would never settle for making their home on a star. Grazers failed their own race by cultivating the plasmic elements that sustained it.

Father was the only one who had seen the sense in her choice, saying, "even the sharpest mind is blunted on the dense hide of a loveless task."

They had shaken their heads all over again when she included an observatory in her dwelling design. What was the point? Grazers worked. They slept. They kept heavy plasma flowing. They didn't have time to look upward. But the elders had spent her childhood preaching to her that every answer lay in deep space, so she incessantly craned her head skyward. Anything less would be madness.

And she pitied anyone who tried to take her stars.

Yet a few hundred were blacking out every day. Differentials dove through her mind as she anticipated how long they had before the universe went completely dark. It was busywork, of course. Far from the most efficient thing she could be doing. Father certainly wouldn't have approved.

But pointless calculation was easier than grappling with the coming darkness and The Great Freeze that would follow.

After the last fusion had fizzled, higher species would ignite planetary forges in a brash attempt to push back the shadows.

They would be among the first to go.

They would laugh into the blackness as if cackling alone could wind up the universe. They might even be grateful there were no stars to confuse their aim as they sailed warships toward the other remaining luminances like scalpels cutting autopsies of galactic cadavers as they vied for the title of Last Light Standing.

But the violence wouldn't reach her. The universe was vast and her dwelling would be floating through it, coal dust on a midnight beach, flung across the black sand by the violent death of her star.

If she opened the powercells now and overfilled them, her dwelling could put shoulder to the void, dutifully parceling out energy for maybe a few hundred thousand years of stillness. She would sit and wait, her observatory idled with nothing to see. There would be no games worth caloric expenditure. No goodbyes worth transcribing for a vacant cosmos, bereft of empathic eyes.