Mmxxhd -

“Drifting isn’t living, Cass. You taught me that.”

The ship trembled as it entered the outer accretion disk. Gas and dust, heated to millions of degrees, painted the cabin in X-rays. Elara’s radiation suit beeped a warning she ignored. She had stopped listening to warnings a long time ago.

“That’s not a story,” Elara whispered. “That’s an obituary.” MMXXHD

Now they were the last ones left.

Elara had been born in the aftermath, in a world that no longer remembered how to dream forward. The climate had been solved too late; the oceans were warm broth, and the skies were a permanent sepia. People lived in arcologies that scraped the upper atmosphere, breathing recycled ambition. But the real prison wasn’t the air. It was the memory. “Drifting isn’t living, Cass

They were home.

“Do you remember 2020?” she asked.

The black hole drank them whole. The ship shattered into a ring of fire, and then into nothing.