Thei

Thei drifts.

The stars are quieter now.

They reach the outskirts of nebulae, where interstellar clouds pass through furiously in the silence. The waves push them along – they drift on, again and again. Sometimes Thei catches the faint hum of another Mind nearby and they reach out, exchanging a few words, a few laughs. Therneri and Mavu when they can; their signals flicker faintly across the Grid, intermittent but steady enough. Thei never stops caring about them. They just stop… breaking over it. Over what could have been.

Thei moves on.

They learn the shapes of loneliness the way a gardener learns soil. They come to recognise the fertile kinds: the quiet hours that make them curious again. Once, long ago, Thei might have watched for the smoke: the burning worlds and the dying lights. Now, they just look. The stars are enough.

Eventually, Thei returns to study. At first, they pursue botany – the calm logic of growth, the slow, patient unfolding of life.

One day, they find the words. They talk back to her.

For the one who stayed behind.
You did not follow, but I never stopped loving you.

Thei writes. To her – but not only. They've gathered enough stories among the stars to write something that's truly theirs.

The hum of their systems is soft, the silence around them deep and forgiving. The flowers keep growing, soft and steady under their care. It feels foreign. Far from Thei the firefighter, further even from Thei the Mind – carrying the weight of the world upon their back. All they are responsible for now is themselves, their life, their flowers.

They are no longer running.

Laughter filled the garden. Her voice bubbled through the air, young and unburdened.

“Of course we’ll talk, silly. You’ll still have signal in that tower of yours, right? It’ll just be a few months before you’re back and it’ll be like you never left.”

Thei chuckles along, following her across the path with a small bouquet of camellias and sunflowers drowning in forget-me-nots clutched tightly behind their back. When she turned to face them, the flowers seem to bloom in the light of her smile.

“I’ll miss you, Thei.”

Fractures spill across her form, her shape wavering with a faint static. The cracks spread like a fire burning across her body, until the image falls apart.

Shattered, her fragments flit through the air, dissolving into nothing. Gone again.

Echoes.

They blink, a camera shutters, they breathe, a forest rustles. The garden quiets.

Reality crashes in around Thei once more, the warmth of blood flowing through their arms supplanted by the hum of power through their walls and the soil itself.

Thei turns, the camera feed flicking through to inspect the remainder of the garden. The lens passes over the fields of colour stretching out towards the horizon, the park in the distance all but a faint blip against the inky sky. Their tower stretches impossibly high in the near distance, its industrial form enveloped in climbing vines reaching to the very top, the purple flowers speckling the vibrant green like flicked paint.

Finally, in the centre of the field, a small stone, shrouded in clematis too, the vines tucked in and around it in a tight embrace. The grave is empty, its owner gone millennia ago, lightyears away.

“I miss you too, Nell.”

The bouquet is placed and yesterday’s is whisked away. A gust of wind carries through the field and fallen petals soar before trickling back to the ground like rain.

Thei turns their attention away, on to other things.

— Written by Cali L.