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He drifted, and the stars wheeled over him.

Their light was pale and endless. The dark between them deeper than thought. His breath came slow, though there was no air to breathe, no ground beneath his feet, no sky above. Still, he did not die.

In the old days, when he had walked among the halls of men, he had not thought of death often. He had thought of maps and machines, of velocity and venting protocols, of how to make fire live in a ship’s heart without letting it burn. But fire, once freed, burns all the same.

He remembered the moment the starship had broken. The sound of alarms, the sight of white fire swallowing metal. He had cried out – he thought he had – and then been cast into the dark.

That should have been his end.

But the end did not come.

Instead, he drifted. Days, perhaps. Years. He could not tell. Time was not made to be counted by those who hung weightless in the void. And he was weightless now. Weightless, and endless.

At first he raged. At the emptiness, at the silence, at himself. Then he fell into stillness. Into apathy.

When the voice first came, it was small, like the thought of water. “You are not dead.”

“No,” he answered.

“You are not alive, either.”

“I remember breath,” he said. “I remember burning. But I did not burn.”

“You are unburned. You are unchanged. That is the curse.”

“Or the gift.”

“That depends,” the voice said, “on what you do with it.”

He turned toward the voice, but there was only the slow drift of the stars.

She returned sometimes, when the silence got too loud. A flicker in the stars. A shape his brain recognized as comfort, or memory, or madness. He didn’t ask which.

He began to remember things he had not cared to. A woman with a braid of copper, singing to a child. The sound of waves against the shore of a world now long dead. A name he had once carried, and another he had spoken in love.

“You are far from those things now,” said the voice.

“I would return.”

“They are gone.”

“I will find them in what comes.”

“You are dreaming.”

“Perhaps. But after all,” he said, and his voice was dry as drifting ash, “dreams rot faster when we pretend they’re still alive.”

The stars did not answer. But he thought, then, that they seemed closer. Warmer.

He closed his eyes, and imagined a way home.