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The last citadel of the House of El was falling. The Thing in the center of the room knew it.
As far as Things went, it was not a particularly vast one, but it was attractively spiked along the edges, and once, before the Great Burning, it had undulated the red-white ribbon-waves along its back in a fashion that made it most desirable. Or so its wife had said.
But now. Now its wife was dead, and the Thing was dying.
I call it a Thing, of course, because that is what the Thing’s son would have named it, should he have ever viewed his father’s last moments from his two-eyed, bipedal adulthood. But that would be many years from now, on a planet full of similarly two-eyed, bipedal humans. Such experiences create certain biases, you understand.
In the here and now, from his place nestled within the folds of the Thing’s back, the Thing’s infant son let out a high-pitched warble. He was hungry. The Thing warbled back at him as it moved him into the satchel of his ship. As it tucked its son’s blanket in around the edges of his ribbon-waves, the Thing found itself dawdling, staring at the beautifully straight spikes along its son’s edges – his mother’s spikes, the Thing thought to itself.
And soon, those spikes would be gone forever. Just like the Thing’s wife. Just like their entire planet.
The Thing closed its eye and fluttered its ribbon-waves down its son’s back. It did not matter, it told itself firmly. Regardless of what his future looked like, of what he looked like in that future, its son would survive. That was the important thing. Its son cooed again, more insistently now, his jagged teeth gnawing at the edge of his blanket. He had never been in this room before. He'd never even been off-world.
There'd never been enough time.
Gently, oh so gently, the Thing tugged the blanket out of it son's mouth, and shut the top of the hatch. Unbothered, its son continued to watch it from behind the round pane of glass. Overhead, the dome of the citadel rumbled. They did not have much time to spare.
The Thing carefully placed the program key into its slot in the ship’s hull. On cue, the gaskets opened and began to fill the compartment with Redistribution Fluid. It was almost time. The Thing drifted backwards, its shredded ribbon-waves fluttering weakly in the dying sunlight. «Do not worry, Kal El» it said. «Wherever you land, you will belong».