Robin, as a writing prompt, sent me this, and wrote: "I want a story, and not a star trek 7 rehash. This is perhaps one of the coolest things I've ever seen in space, and I want a story from you that matches it
Depending on distance and point of view, every world has a different name for it. It has been called the Heartstorm, and the Dream Thread, and the River of Stars. On a world where it pulses in the night sky, where its energies drum a slow and torpid beat in the heavens, it is referred to as God's Vein. Some have a small inkling of what happened at its heart, and their names for it are ever so carefully fabricated, as if to name the destruction too accurately would be to call its occurrences down onto their own heads. They call it the Last Cry of Alkenar, and the Skybreaker's Ring, and the Martyrs' Nebula - although it is no nebula; it's what's left of a solar system, its sun gone nova, all its contents reduced to dust in the slice of a moment. Sixty light-years across now, it is an ever-expanding cloud of roiling energy, burning so hot that the void itself turns to purple flame in its wake.
From a safe distance of a few light-years it appears to be a pale violet ribbon streaked with white, stretched like a dividing line across the great field of stars. And only a handful have ever seen it from closer and survived.
Depending on distance and point of view, every world has a different name for it. It has been called the Heartstorm, and the Dream Thread, and the River of Stars. On a world where it pulses in the night sky, where its energies drum a slow and torpid beat in the heavens, it is referred to as God's Vein. Some have a small inkling of what happened at its heart, and their names for it are ever so carefully fabricated, as if to name the destruction too accurately would be to call its occurrences down onto their own heads. They call it the Last Cry of Alkenar, and the Skybreaker's Ring, and the Martyrs' Nebula - although it is no nebula; it's what's left of a solar system, its sun gone nova, all its contents reduced to dust in the slice of a moment. Sixty light-years across now, it is an ever-expanding cloud of roiling energy, burning so hot that the void itself turns to purple flame in its wake.
From a safe distance of a few light-years it appears to be a pale violet ribbon streaked with white, stretched like a dividing line across the great field of stars. And only a handful have ever seen it from closer and survived.
During the Prismatic War, the Verdant Prince Diadam took his entire fleet into the storm, riding the energy of its expanding edge like a windsailer before a tsunami. A full two-thirds of his ships were destroyed in the endeavor, thousand year old vessels with histories as deep as nations in their own right. But when the survivors emerged a year later, they appeared as if by magic in the middle of the Freeholdings of Orange, and laid waste to the entire system, bringing the war to a decisive close.
The only one to have ever pierced the outer edge itself was the artist Jaime Uture, who locked himself in a bottle of ice mainted at absolute zero, left floating in front of the expanding edge. When they found him a month later, they discovered to their surprise that the bottle had maintained structural integrity, but Uture had not. He never spoke again, or painted, except for vast, magnificant, shapeless murals of purple and white.
And i, of course, have watched it carefully. I have spent weeks - months - keeping but a fiftieth of a light-year ahead of it, staring deep into its chaotic wavefront, hoping to find something familiar in its eddies and whorls of brilliant destruction; to discover something lost. I have spent lifetimes with it, examining its face as if that of a lover. Because for me, it is all that i have left of home.
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