Chapter Text
You had to admit, you were getting pretty tired of the sun exploding.
What a problem to have. Normally, it would happen once and then be over with, and yet here you were, going through it over and over again. It always went the exact same way, too, like a well-rehearsed routine, a perfect play you wanted no part in.
The sun would swell up, turn orange and then red, like it was angry about something you, the mere Hearthian you were, didn’t have the perspective to know about. It would become so red and so huge, you wondered how no one else seemed to notice what was going on. Maybe they did, and you were too busy crashing into the Attlerock to know.
After a moment of agonizing tension, the sun—a red giant, now, a wound in the sky shining with anger—would contract all at once. You could almost imagine interstellar hands grabbing it and crumpling it up like a paper ball, and then letting it go as it exploded. The first time you’d realized what was going on, you’d watched it in fascination, only to realize that watching the sun explode was a very effective way of severely damaging your eyesight. It would reach out in fiery blue tendrils across the solar system, and before it even reached you, you’d feel your blood boiling under your charring skin—followed swiftly by chilling numbness as your nerves burned away.
And then there was nothing at all.
By the stars, it hurt. It hurt more than anything you’d ever experienced, to the point where you had trouble conceptualizing it until it was already happening again. The pain was swift, but it wasn’t just about the pain—it was about being so profoundly obliterated, along with everything and everyone else you’d ever known and loved. You’d tried telling Slate about it, but they always insisted that you’d just been dreaming, and everything was fine, and that the sun wasn’t going to explode for a while yet. But they didn’t know. They couldn’t remember, not like you could. They didn’t understand how much it hurt. That it was a pain that no one should ever have to go through, let alone over and over again. (How many times had it been? You figured that keeping count would be a fast track to existential dread, but it had to be somewhere in the mid teens by now. That number carried a poisonous promise to rise swiftly, bringing more pain in its wake.)
At least it was over quickly.
…
You opened your eyes, only to close them again. Maybe if you could just go back to sleep, everything would be back to normal when you woke up, and you could go through with your first launch and explore the solar system and the sun would stay placid and golden and it wouldn’t reach out and consume everything in its wake—
…But that was just wishful thinking. There’s nothing quite like the impending inescapability of a supernova. You knew that firsthand. All you could do was explore the solar system in the twenty-or-so minutes you were afforded, and wait for the end to come when it will.
Or…
You sat up, causing Slate to glance your way. You gave them a noncommittal nod, and set your eyes on the stars. Though the supernova seemed inescapable, that couldn’t be actually true. They could only reach so far. You’d watched a supernova or two in the sky above even before the time loop started, and they’d fizzled out, the same as a dying campfire. You still weren’t quite sure how this time loop business worked, but surely it wouldn’t hurt if you actually tried to escape, right?
At the very least, it would get you out of being consumed by the sun—for this loop, anyway.
You stood, kicking away the bedroll. When you reached the launch tower’s elevator, Slate started to say something as usual, but you waved them off and punched in the launch codes. You’d heard plenty of stories involving hapless characters getting caught up in time loops, and generally they either reset upon the day ending, or when they died. Your unfortunate habit of dying in space within approximately twenty minutes had prevented you from properly testing the parameters of what qualified a loop as having ended. But if you didn’t die from the supernova, then surely you could find out.
Putting on your suit was becoming second nature. Flying the ship was still a work in progress, but at least the initial liftoff was no longer quite as much of a mad scramble not to immediately crash into the village. Open space was generally much easier, though, seeing as there weren’t nearly as many obstacles to get in your way, or gravity to fight against.
You picked a star in the distance to follow—a bright blue one in a cluster of more distant motes of light—and hit the throttle. If you were going to successfully outrun a supernova, you’d have to start early, and go fast . Surely it would work. Surely.
It took a little while to leave the solar system, but all in all, it wasn’t very difficult. You hadn’t thought to try before, so you underestimated how easy it would be. All you’d had to do was hold forward, and try not to hit any planets on the way. But once you left the system, there was just void, with nothing to get in your way whatsoever. After a while of accelerating through the depths of space and admiring the stars, your mind began to wander from your objective, as it was wont to do. You idly wondered if, given enough time, you could reach another star and its system. Your ship hadn’t been made for deep space, but that was probably fine. The time loop would, in all likelihood, bring you back to the campfire anyway, whether or not you died.
…But what if you needed to die to make it work?
At that thought, a pit seemed to form in your gut. You didn’t understand nearly enough about the time loop to have made this kind of judgment, and yet you’d still gone hurtling off into deep space the second you’d had the idea. What if you needed to be in a certain range of the Nomai statue you were certain had set the time loop into motion? What if you needed to die in a certain time frame? How quickly the consequence of death had lost its bite, until the moment of realization that you might not come back brought back all the primal fear and uncertainty it had carried before.
You jerked on the controls of your ship, turning it around and trying to see if you could return to the solar system somehow—only to see that your sun was just a distant red speck, and you were still heading at several tens of thousands of meters per second away from it. There was no way you could possibly make it back in time. You should have thought this through , you wouldn’t be in this situation if you had just been smarter and thought this through.
You watched and waited, frozen, for the bright red mote of light in the distance to burst into even brighter blue.
…
For a moment, nothing happened. Every second ticking by seemed to turn your nerves to ice, one millimeter at a time.
And then—you’d always been dead when this happened, so you had no forewarning—a very peculiar feeling suddenly washed over you. You hadn’t experienced it before, but you had no time to react before your vision seemed to fade out all at once, like you’d fallen asleep standing. When you found yourself reliving everything you’d experienced within the past twenty minutes, despite the lingering strangeness of the experience, you were relieved beyond belief. Everything was fine. You hadn’t died, and the time loop had called you back anyway. In all honesty, you mused as you watched your memories flash in your mind's eye, this version of the experience was much more pleasant than being greeted by it upon dying in whatever painful way that you'd become surprisingly skilled at encountering. You might try to make a habit of going out and resetting the loop at your leisure, death-free—though, if you were being honest with yourself, you'd probably be too busy crashing your ship and finding new and unique ways to die painfully to be able to make it out to deep space on any sort of regular basis. No matter. You were going to be waking up at the campfire in a moment. You hadn't doomed yourself. You could find a way to manage the time loop on your own terms. Everything was going to be alright. Everything was going to be…
You opened your eyes.
You saw the wall of your ship.
…
The blue light that was all that remained of your sun had long since dissipated, leaving you with no way of navigating your way back to your solar system. It wasn’t as if there was anything left there, anyway, but not even knowing where your entire life had used to be was disquieting. It might have been nice to have that comfort. Or, it might have just made you feel worse, though you couldn’t imagine feeling worse than you already were.
Rations were tight on your ship. You hadn’t expected to go very far at all on your first launch, and thus you hadn’t packed for anything more than a quick trip to the Attlerock or somewhere else nearby; though you had an unlimited supply of marshmallows, you could hardly survive off of them. Food wasn’t even the main concern in the first place.
No, the main concern was that the last of your water supplies had run out days ago.
You knew you didn’t have much time left.
It was staggering how quickly you had degenerated. It did not take long to reach a point where all you could think about was how badly you wanted— needed— water. The only thing you could do to cope was sleep when you could, which granted a brief reprieve from your rapidly worsening condition. You entertained yourself by re-reading the fragments of rumors you had cataloged in your ship log, and wondering where each thread would have taken you.
Unfortunately, that didn’t last.
Before long, you felt by far worse than you ever had in your life—your head hurt so badly, your dry lungs protested air with all they had, and you were certain you looked like some sort of mummified caricature of yourself. No one could survive long without water, and you knew that, but you had truly underestimated how unpleasant a death this would be. Before long, you had been reduced to only being capable of staring out into space and trying not to curse yourself for getting yourself into this situation in your increasingly scarce moments of consciousness. Ruminating on your mistakes was pointless. Wondering why, why, why, why you hadn’t awoken at the campfire, in spite of the time loop, in spite of having already lived through your memories, why, why, why—
Pointless.
You were dying anyway. Your body felt like it was falling apart. It was falling apart. You would kill for water, for company, for anything but the cold, unfeeling void of space—to think it had appealed to you, to think you had wanted so bad to explore it and tease out its secrets! It was not a friend. It was a death sentence. It was so foolishly naive to have ever believed it could be anything else. You laid there in your pilot’s seat, listlessly staring out at the unending expanse of black. That very inexorable void seemed to taunt you. It whispered in an inaudible voice, telling you that all of your family and all of your friends had been snuffed out with the sun, and with your impending death, the last remnants of your kind would be forever gotten to space, in its endless, inexorable darkness. Most likely a hallucination. You were slipping.
You would have given anything to hear someone else’s voice. You would have given anything to go back in time again, and know better than to try something this foolish. If there was a solution to be found, a way to stop the time loop or, if you were really going to indulge in wishful thinking, a way to save everyone from the sun’s deadly embrace.
Hadn’t you already thought about this before? It was getting harder to stay awake. Thinking only made the splitting headache worse. You knew that if you went back to sleep, you wouldn’t wake up again, and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. To let go… and to rest…
It wasn’t as if there was anything left for you. There was nowhere to explore, no home to return to. Not anymore.
Maybe if you just let go…
You’d heard debates over whether there was anything after death. You’d always been one to doubt it, but…
It would be nice to see everyone again.