The voyage has been long
The voyage has been long, and the man knows it. His suit’s outer plating is scored from meteor dust, its filters clogged with years of recycled air. Every step along the barren surface feels both heavier and lighter—heavier with exhaustion, lighter with the knowledge that he is nearly home.
The star he has been orbiting for months is dying. Its light flares erratically, spilling bursts of brilliance one moment, then collapsing into dim shadows the next. The shifting radiance plays tricks on his vision. Sometimes it reveals a pathway across the desolate terrain of the colony’s abandoned perimeter; sometimes it erases the ground altogether, leaving him suspended in a void of possibility. He cannot tell if the unstable light is guiding him forward or warning him away.
He has been chasing this mission for years, though he no longer remembers if it began as a search for a planet, a person, or simply himself. In the flickering glow of the collapsing star, he begins to suspect the journey has always been about what survives after everything else ends—hope, memory, or regret.
The light flickers again. In its unstable brilliance he sees projections, like ghosts caught in broken data streams: a woman who once stood at his side, a brother lost to deep-space silence, the boy he once was before he chose the stars over everything else. They do not speak, but their presence is undeniable, written across the fractured horizon.
Ahead, the terrain rises to a crystalline ridge—an outcropping formed by some long-forgotten experiment, now pulsing faintly with power. The dying star’s final rays strike it, bending and scattering, as if the ridge itself were a threshold. Beyond it is only darkness: uncharted space, or perhaps nothing at all. He senses that what lies past this ridge will decide everything—whether the voyage has meant salvation, or if it has all been for nothing.
The man steadies his failing oxygen reserves, takes one final breath through the rasp of his mask, and climbs toward the light.
Prompt: Write the ending of his story. What does the man discover as he reaches the ridge? Is it the remnant of a civilization, a portal through the collapsing star, or the end of all things? Finish the story, and let the shifting light of a dying sun determine his fate.
