Images of broken light dance behind my eyelids. How could this giant lamp compare to the sun?
Everything is wrong here. Shattered. Broken.
Like the light.
Like me.
I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn’t have one.
I am surrounded by walls.
I have just replaced one box for another.

I can think of nothing but the stars. It is like a piece of my soul had been lost, empty, and it is now filled with the light of a million stars. They are all that I have ever dreamed of; they are nothing that I ever expected... I will never, never be the same. I have seen stars. Real stars.

The dark sky.
A hundred million stars.
More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.

Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.

The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.

And then we see the end.
Godspeed’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t make the boom! of an exploding bomb.

There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.

Nothing else—no sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.
Nothing else to signify Elder’s death.
Just light.
And then it’s gone.

And then he’s gone.

Even though on the outside we glittered like gold, inside we were almost as black as coal. Sometimes the glitter people saw was only the shattered pieces reflecting among the broken glass.

We are spirits deceived by the sky to create light and trade our souls to the sun but fail to become galaxies when it's dark

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.