The Last Song Beneath the Stars

Seren had always known she was the last.

The Observatory’s glass dome groaned beneath the winds that scoured the dead Earth, but she barely noticed anymore. The hum of the machines was her lullaby, the stars her only companions.

When the world fell silent decades ago, the radio towers had gone dark. She had been a child then, too young to grasp the word extinction, but old enough to remember what silence felt like after the voices vanished.

Now, she lived inside that silence.

Every night she climbed the spiral stair to the Observatory’s roof, wrapped herself in her father’s coat, and whispered the stars’ names as if they were prayers: Sirius, Vega, Altair, Deneb… Reciting them felt like calling ghosts back into existence.

It was on one such night, with her breath crystallizing in the air, that she heard it.

Not the wind. Not the groan of steel.

Music.

Faint, broken, buried in the static of her battered receiver. A voice—no, not a voice, but something like one—singing. Notes stretched like threads of light across the void.

Her hands shook as she turned the dials, clinging to the sound. For the first time in years, she wasn’t alone.

---

The song returned the next night. And the night after that.

Seren began to live for it. She would wait in trembling silence until the melody slid once more through the static. It was in no language she knew, yet emotion poured from every note. Longing. Sorrow. Beauty persisting beyond ruin.

She answered.

Her father had taught her the piano before the world ended. The Observatory’s instrument was cracked and stiff, but her fingers remembered. She played back through the transmitter—fragments of Chopin, Debussy, lullabies her mother once sang. She poured herself into the keys, praying something, someone, was listening.

And always, the song returned.

---

Weeks blurred into months. Seren pieced together fragments, learning patterns as though she were being taught a language built from music. She dreamed of the voice, of the being who sang back to her.

One night, the melody changed. It pulsed, insistent, repeating a sequence of rising and falling notes.

A message.

She mapped the pattern against the stars and froze. It pointed toward Orion’s belt, where clouds of gas shimmered like spilled ink.

It’s telling me where to go.

---

The Observatory had never been meant for travel, but the old escape shuttle buried beneath it still held promise. Her father had once forbidden her from touching it, saying it was only for the end.

Perhaps, she thought, this is the end—or the beginning.

She worked tirelessly, scavenging, repairing, teaching herself from brittle manuals. Her hands bled. Her body weakened. But the song drove her forward.

When at last the shuttle roared to life, she strapped herself in, embracing her father's coat still around her shoulders to not feel lonely. The engines screamed, and the horizon fell away. Grey deserts, broken oceans, forgotten cities shrank behind her, and the black sea of space opened its arms.

Seren wept. she wept screams of hope and happiness.

---

She followed the song.

Days stretched into something timeless. Silence pressed in from all sides, broken only by her own breath. Yet the music never faltered. It grew stronger, brighter, pulling her onward.

Her food dwindled. Oxygen crept toward red. Still she pressed on.

At last, after what felt like eternity, she saw it.

A star—enormous, sapphire-blue, wrapped in a nebula of colors no human eye was meant to see. Circling it, like jewels suspended in the void, were structures: towers of light, rings that glittered like spun glass.

Her breath caught.

The song was no longer faint—it thundered. Not a solitary voice, but a chorus that shook her soul.

---

She guided the shuttle toward one of the rings.

There, shapes moved—beings sculpted of light and shadow, their forms fluid, like living constellations. They turned toward her.

Fear and awe battled in her chest. What was she compared to them? A fragile creature from a dead planet, wrapped in an old coat. She braced herself for rejection.

Instead, they answered.

Not with words, but with music.

The chorus swelled, enfolding her. Memories surged through her: stars being born, suns collapsing, civilizations rising and crumbling like tides. And in the center of it all, their loneliness. Their endless search across the dark for another voice.

She had not been hearing one singer, but all of them. An entire people, reaching out.

And she had answered.

---

Tears blurred her vision. She reached trembling hands to the window.

“I’m here,” she whispered.

The beings drew closer. Light spilled into her shuttle, wrapping around her like warmth, like home. The gauges screamed warnings—oxygen failing, systems collapsing—but she no longer cared.

For the first time since Earth fell silent, she was not alone.

---

The last thing she remembered was music.

It lifted her, weightless, cradled her in brilliance. She closed her eyes, and for once did not dream of loss, but of belonging.

When her shuttle finally went dark, drifting among the rings, the beings carried her out.

And somewhere, across the ruined Earth’s skies, if one listened closely to the static, one could still hear her piano—notes echoing back through the void, a girl’s last song beneath the stars.

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