#8 – Farewell to an old friend

“It has been a while,” he whispered casually. In the cold vacuum of space, the sound was inaudible, and yet there, hovering in the darkness before him, was a presence, just beyond the barrier of nearly indestructible diamond and corundum that he had called many things- tomb, womb, refuge, prison- but was really one thing. Home.

From the void, a whisper that should not have been heard responded.

He sighed to hear even an echo of another being’s thoughts, this close, for it had been an eternity since anyone had spoken to him directly- oh, his dreams were freeing, his travels of the mind were limitless and far, far from the dying star that now swallowed the rest of his homeworld piece by piece. That would swallow him, eventually. He had lived in it’s welcoming glow for most of it’s life. To outlive one’s children is a sad fate. To outlive one’s people is a curse. But to outlive one’s race? One’s sun?

Why, only the visitor knew of such a sense of loss, in all of his vast experience, he had never known another with the same memory.

What they spoke of, there in the last aeons of that doomed place, were secrets and truths that are beyond our ken. But ultimately, it was a somber countenance from the visitor, who with his own powers would leave the inescapable gravity well, but only after asking, just once.

Just one moment of …mercy? … weakness? Or just compassion?

Smiling deep within his inpregnable, unassailable and doomed fortress, he sighed, and smiled.” No, old friend, I have seen and done all I wished to in this wrealm. It is time for me to depart. I am sorry for you, to be alone at the end of All Things. Perhaps we shall meet again…”

The light that should not have been seen from deep within the diamond colossus faded to azure, to twilight, to darkness.

And the visitor faded away as well.

Just wanted to add a tip of the hat to rdouek- his excellent image the Warden moved me to make my own cosmic imagery.

Category: 2011, Fantasy, Scifi