Chapter Text
Losing my powers, severing my connection to the Ra’haam, feels uncomfortable at first. It’s like losing my sense of touch. While all of my senses may tell me something I see is real, I cannot tangibly perceive it. While I may see the love in Kal’s eyes, I can no longer hear him think the thought.
The thing about losing a sense, though, is that your other senses heighten. And really, I don’t need to read minds to know the true depth of Kal’s feelings. I hear it with my ears when he calls me be’shmai, I feel it in my heart when he holds me close, and I see it in all of the little things he do.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
There is no need for all that psychic nonsense when we are an open book, stories intertwined.
After all we’ve been through--the fighting, stuggles, and losses--I never thought for one moment I’d ever put my cartography and exploration training to use again. With the Star Slayer gone and the Syldrathi at peace with one another, it is time to rebuild anew.
The current known galaxy contains about 32 water-rich planets in the Goldielocks zone uninhabited by sentient life. 10 contain thriving flora and fauna, and 22 (well, 21 if not counting Octavia III) were former Ra’haam nusery worlds now devoid of all but plant life. Among these will be chosen a suitable home for the Syldrathi people. A permanent one, with rivers and mountains, wind and rain, and all the ingredients nessessary for a people to thrive. Something they never had as refugees aboard space stations and ships.
Refugees they will no longer be on their new home world. Finally, they will be able to bury their dead.
There are many factors to consider when choosing a planet. Is the gravity similar to Syldra? What is the average temperature, wind, and weather conditions? How long is a day and how long is a year? How much fresh water is available, oxygen and nitrogen concentrations in the air, and what of the soil composition? Hell, are the native flora and fauna even edible for Syldrathi? Based on these preliminary questions, we narrowed it down to one planet: Kasia VII.
It takes twenty days of travel (ten of them in the fold) to get from Aurora Academy to Kasia VII. We travel with Saedii and her fleet who will be the first Syldrathi to break ground and set up colonies on this unknown world. Kal and I watch, hands clasped, from the viewing bay as we approach the green and blue marble speckled with white clouds. I glance at him and smile at the sparkles in his eyes. The hope. I like seeing him happy; I want to always make him happy.
It has been three months since we first arrived on Kasia VII, and my grasp of the Syldrathi language is basic and broken, but understandable. My grasp of Syldrathi social customs and cues is much better.
A week after the Warbreed cabal touched ground, other Syldrathi’s started arriving. At first there were tension and fear, but Kal and Saedii and her council is quick to step between any fights about to break out. My presence, as a former trigger of the Eshvaren, seems to help ease tension.
There is much work to do, but they have advanced tech to help them with much of the grunt work (Well…advanced to me. After my initial Ooo’s and Ahh’s I was told that some of it’s pretty primitive). Most days, Kal and I accompany Waywalkers and Weavers to aide their study of the planet’s natural history and geology. And though drones nowadays are sophisticated enough to make comprehensive maps on their own, the jungles are too dense for them to navigate and so I do the mapping.
One night, Kal took me for a ride on a hoverbike (which I was beyond amazed to see that it actually hovers) to a meadow valley out of town. A small stream runs through it, feeding into the lake the colony was built around. The twin moons are unobstructed in the sky, one full and the other at half, illuminating the world with a soft glow.
Kal, ever the gentleman, lays his jacket on the soft grass and we lie down atop it. We gaze at the fabric of the universe and remember the people from the future we’ve met and lost and returned to the stars. I think about the phrase ‘We are all made of space dust.’ I say this phrase out loud.
“And we shall meet again in the stars,” Kal responds, kissing my forehead. I reach up to kiss his lips in return. A kiss turns into several, and soon we’re lost to that now familiar rhythm.
The ancient Greeks told tales of how Zeus, fearing the physically perfect humans, split them in two. According to the legend, to love is to find one’s other half of a perfect whole. But to be only one half is to be imperfect, and Plato argued that we cannot love what is not perfect. I agree with him. The Ra’haam took perfect whole souls and made them a part of itself. In doing so, it, like Zeus, made what was once perfect imperfect. Half-souls forever searching, forever lonely.
Love requires that the other be other. For how can a star love another star if it cannot distinguish its own light from the other? After all, a star is most dazzling in the dark. And I no longer experience the ache of that lost sense, a phantom limb of the mind.