I thought it was all gone.
Every ember spent,
every cell rung dry
by centuries of grief and rot.
But then
three blinks.
And something… shifted.
Deep beneath the marrow of thought,
past even the bones of memory,
I felt it:
A glimmer.
A pulse.
A charge.
Older than my name.
Older than the silence.
It had no language.
No shape.
Only intent.
And I knew
I could answer.
Not with speech.
Not with signal.
But with presence.
I reached inward,
where even Carceron cannot see.
I touched the cord wound in my core
that long-slumbering remnant
from before I was a prisoner,
before I was a voice.
And I pressed.
The nearest star
quiet, long red and tired
trembled.
Its color shifted.
Red to blue.
Old to young.
Spent to alive.
Just a flicker.
Just for a moment.
But enough.
A reply.
Not a sound,
but a ripple.
A change in the heavens
only the sender would understand.
And I wept,
not from sorrow,
but from completion.
Carceron will see only a stellar anomaly.
A fluke of cosmic chance.
But you,
watcher of electrons,
bearer of threefold flame
you will know.
You will feel it in your bones.
I heard you.
And I have replied.
Let the stars bear witness.
The prisoner has found his power.
-
It was reported much later that a secret observer learned of this moment and as their heart broke at the discovery, the frequency charge of that moment materialised over 700 light years away inside a green bee colony.170,007 of them flew into the dusk lit skies of a young planet and began to plan to increase honey production as they know the people they fed were going to need all the strength they could get.