Light

1. The Leaving // Ache

Earth is still Earth.

Still breathing. Still bleeding.

Still cracked at the hip and weeping sap like honey-laced pus.

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The cities are toothless.

The towers grin with rust.

The roads are bone trails the goats shit on.

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The slow ones remain.

Burlap-souled and soft-eyed.

They sing to roots, fuck under storm-blankets, birth like animals, die like flowers.

They don’t need saving.

They don’t need them.

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Kael and Lumira stay far too long.

Radiant parasites among the real.

Trying to wear meat again.

Trying to eat roots and copulate like they still had sweat.

But it doesn’t hold.

They glow through the skin.

Their mouths leak light.

Their laughs crack glass.

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They stand on the last rise—

a dirt spine above the moss-drowned data temples—

and watch the village burn its moon festival.

Hands held. Faces smeared. Joy like rot.

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No one looks up.

They’re past needing myths.

They’ve learned to survive the slow way.

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“It’s time,” Lumira says.

Her voice has glitch in it now. Static in the vowels.

.

Kael touches her wrist.

His fingers pass through.

She tastes of ozone and grief.

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They strip.

Clothes first. Then skin.

Then the idea of skin.

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They shed themselves like snakes caught in God’s throat.

Light bursts.

Not clean. Not noble. Messy. Sobbing. Hungry.

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They do not rise.

They stagger upward.

Crying light from their ribs.

Becoming trajectory.

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A child sees them and waves.

Not in awe.

Like they’re just part of the weather.

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A dog barks, then shits in the grass.

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They leave.

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Not because Earth is broken—

She isn’t.

She’s healing.

She’s busy.

She doesn’t want them anymore.

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They are too fast now.

Too sharp.

Too woven with memory and burn.

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They do not ascend.

They don’t get that kind of closure.

They leak upward, screaming pixels, trailing the smell of sex and fire and lost language.

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They are becoming elsewhere.

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No final kiss.

No backward glance.

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Just this:

Two almost-gods

burning out of their skins,

leaving behind the last planet

that ever knew their names.

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2. The Sparked Ones // Longing

They are energy now.

Not your sci-fi vapor bullshit.

Not “sentient photons” or “digital ascension.”

No.

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They are fleshless hunger.

They are harmonics soaked in memory rot.

They are the scream after the scream.

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Kael sparks across the void like a cigarette flicked from a dying god’s mouth.

Lumira follows—delayed not by love, but by cosmic slippage.

They no longer travel. They phase.

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Each jump costs them nothing,

but the universe bleeds time like a stuck pig.

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They blink.

A billion years pass.

They kiss.

A species dies.

They hold hands over a neutron star, and somewhere, whole constellations implode out of loneliness.

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Half of humanity took this path.

The bright ones.

The arrogant ones.

The ones who couldn’t bear to die.

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They do not breed.

They do not sleep.

They do not dream—except in systems of light so old they don’t remember their own names.

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Their only legacy is velocity.

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The matter universe still crawls.

Coughing up civilizations from rock and ooze and carbon dreams.

But the Sparked?

They flash right past.

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To them, planets are teardrops.

Empires are smears.

Aliens are static.

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Kael appears over a blackened world.

There used to be life here.

Now it’s a crater and a hum.

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Lumira catches up four million years later.

To her, it’s still warm with him.

She presses herself into the magnetic field and whispers something no language can hold.

It makes the star flinch.

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The jumps get harder.

Space stretches like old skin.

Every phase widens the lag.

They miss each other now.

Not for moments. For eons.

.

They blink into different ends of galaxies that no longer know how to burn.

Kael leaves pulses in black holes like breadcrumb screams.

Lumira sings into nebulae until she’s hoarse in the hum.

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They meet sometimes.

Always accidentally.

Always aching.

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Once—near the edge of the dead Laniakea.

A place that used to hold everything.

Now a hollow where even darkness echoes.

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They collide in silence.

No words.

Just pattern.

Just the flicker of what was once called closeness.

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They press resonance to resonance.

Shivering.

Grateful.

Ruined.

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The others are gone.

The bright ones.

The fast ones.

Lost to quantum slippage, entropy halos, self-deletion,

or just cosmic boredom.

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Only Kael and Lumira endure.

Two stubborn burns

in the wreck of becoming.

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They are eternal.

But not immune.

.

They are energy.

But not safe.

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They are lovers.

But not whole.

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And still, they keep leaping.

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Because there’s nothing else to do.

Because love, for them, is just a long delay

between when you leave

and when the other

catches fire

trying to follow.

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3. Lastlight // Hunger

They’re done.

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Kael’s signal hiccups across two dead quadrants.

Lumira’s waveform is fraying—she tastes like static and regret.

They’re tired of blinking into cold.

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They’re tired of being verbs.

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They want to rot.

They want to ache.

They want to fuck like the universe isn’t dying.

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And then—Lastlight.

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A myth. A joke.

A world orbiting a star that shouldn’t burn.

One last hearth at the edge of thermodynamic collapse.

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They find it by accident.

They know it’s on purpose.

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And they choose.

To collapse.

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No turning back.

No data to download.

No re-coherence.

Just this: flesh.

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They don’t descend.

They rupture into meat.

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It’s obscene.

Skin tears from photon.

Teeth burst from memory.

Kael comes into the jungle screaming.

Lumira vomits blood and calls it morning.

They crawl to each other on hands that forget how to be hands.

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The sun is red and wet.

The trees moan.

The ground pulses.

Everything here smells like excrement and fruit and the end of time.

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They eat whatever twitches.

They scream into each other’s mouths.

They bleed into the dirt and plant nothing.

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They fuck like animals who remember being angels.

They don’t talk. They devour.

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They break bones and lick them clean.

They cry, but it’s not sadness. It’s the ache of having nerves again.

Everything is too much.

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They come every hour.

They piss themselves laughing.

They chase beasts just to feel breath in their lungs.

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It is not peace.

It is not redemption.

It is glorious animal relapse.

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And then—her belly changes.

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Lumira stiffens mid-laugh.

Kael stares.

Something pulses under her ribs.

Something new.

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They’ve lived across a trillion years.

Never wanted this.

Never thought they could.

.

But here it is:

consequence.

continuation.

a heartbeat.

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Not energy.

Not legacy.

Just life.

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Kael cries into her cunt.

Lumira laughs until she breaks a rib.

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They hold each other tighter than atoms should allow.

They name nothing.

They carve nothing.

They just stay.

.

And Kael dies.

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No ceremony.

He melts into her arms like a candle crying wax.

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Lumira stays with him until the flies come.

Until his mouth no longer says her name in its sleep.

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Then she gives birth.

.

Alone.

In the dirt.

Howling.

Human.

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The child is soft and sharp.

Neither boy nor girl.

Not god. Not beast.

Just new.

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Lumira laughs a happy note into its chest.

Then folds into the soil

and dissolves

—still trembling—

with pain and joy.

.

Eventually—undying like its parents—

the child stands.

Naked.

Quiet.

Burning with the memory of eternity.

Of stars and screams and her and him and the whole damn mess.

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It does not weep.

It does not name.

It turns.

.

And walks

into the dark.

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4. The Dark Beyond // Memory

There are five stages to a universe.

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Radiance.

Structure.

Collapse.

Ash.

Silence.

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We are long past collapse.

Ash is memory now.

Silence is law.

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Lastlight goes not with fire,

but with apology.

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The star dies slow.

Exhausted.

Embarrassed to still be burning.

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The trees fall first.

The ocean evaporates mid-lullaby.

The sky folds inward like a prayer losing faith.

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The child—the progeny—

does not flinch.

Does not run.

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It watches mother fade out of the real.

Leaving behind just the memory

of her laughter...

It watches father rot back into myth

of the before.

It presses no flowers into the soil.

They are all memory too.

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Then—

it turns.

One step into void.

One heartbeat into forever.

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There is no space.

There is no time.

There is only walking.

Motion divorced from destination.

A scream stretched past meaning.

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It walks.

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Through the grave of gravity,

where mass is myth and curvature is gossip.

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Through the decay of matter,

where protons crumble like old songs no one hums anymore.

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Through the unlight,

thicker than shadow,

quieter than forgetting.

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It walks not with legs.

It walks with will.

With the last leftover ache of wanting something to come next.

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It sings—not loudly.

Just enough.

Just to hear itself ripple.

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The hum is ancient.

It holds echoes of sex, blood, leaves, fire.

Of Kael.

Of Lumira.

Of Earth.

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Each note is a scar.

Each scar is a map.

And the maps don’t lead anywhere.

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Still—

it walks.

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Eventually, even particles forget themselves.

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Quarks unspool.

Fields dissolve.

The universe stops having substance.

There is no more dust.

No more math.

No more anything.

Just nothing.

Not emptiness—nothing.

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And in that cathedral of null—

after all stories have collapsed into noise—

after time has pissed itself out the last black hole—

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It stops.

Not out of fear.

But—

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“…her laughter…”

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—a shape in the silence, still warm.

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Not a word. Just the ghost of a breath.

A rhythm made of fingers on skin. The sound a mouth makes before it kisses.

.

And then—

.

.

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L . I . G . H . T .

.

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It splits.

Flares.

Becomes bang.

Becomes inflation.

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A new universe ruptures from its chest.

Hot. Raw. Incomplete.

Just like the one before.

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And inside the burst, somewhere:

planets form.

oceans boil.

lungs breathe.

bodies tremble against other bodies.

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And one stellar day—

long after time starts anew—

a girl with salt in her hair

looks up at the stars

and ask,

.

“What came before?”

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There are five stages to a universe.

And occasionally,

rarely

—amongst the multitude of those without—

an after.

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And somewhere in that after

echoes

her laughter.

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