"Are you ready?" he asks, lifting her bag into the storage compartment of the shuttle; his own excuse to spend a few more moments by her side. And what he's really asking is, "Are you sure you want to do this alone?"
She smiles at him as she steps into the pod, securing the undecorated metal canister she's carrying in its holding bracket, and hugs him for the fifth time today. He holds her tight and she nods against his chin. She'll never be ready, but life has a way of painfully forcing its own forward progression, turning children into adults, and adults into warriors.
She's in the pilot seat. He closes the door behind her.
The trip down to the planet takes enough time to start thinking about what she's doing. She wills herself not to grip the controls too hard, forces herself to stay focused on the various lights and monitors on the dashboard as she slowly descends through the atmosphere and her grief.
Death. All around her, death. The silver canister rattles behind her in the cockpit as she struggles against the pocket of turbulence she hits before she's down below the clouds, skimming along the stony valley that was once a jewel city and is now a few loping spires of wind-polished metal and dust. There are no trees anywhere.
She thinks she recognises a shape or two. Vague ghosts of former landmarks; the skeletal remains of gravity-defying structures and highways that once stretched high and far, arrogantly challenging nature with their immortal design, now reduced to ancient craters and forgotten hubris.
The landscape is greyish rock as far as the eye can see: down into the valley where the dry riverbed streaks across the flats, and up into the mountains surrounding her as she approaches the small foothill on the outskirts of her home city.
When she last fled her planet as nuclear destruction rained from the sky and flames tore her world apart, she couldn't imagine anything reclaiming the planet's surface. But she was wrong. She steps out into breathable air onto settled ground that shows none but the barest traces of radiation on her helmet display, drifting out of worn-down craters from millenias-old warfare.
And under her feet, spread out across the great, empty valley in the mixed violet hues of late Altean afternoon is what amazes her: A hardy yellow lichen, clinging to rock and sand alike, parched and dry under the cloudless dome of sky, but there nonetheless. She reaches down, plucking a piece of it from the ground and holds it in her palm.
Ten thousand years is a long time.
She's close enough now to move forward on foot. The canister gets tucked under her arm after she exchanges it with her helmet in her pack and hikes the bag onto her shoulders. She could have gone closer in her shuttle, but her legs twitched and her heart ached and her body wanted the walk.
She's ready, now. She inhales deep breaths and lets the tears well in her eyes. She allows them to spill forward freely as she begins the slow ascent up the hillside before her, gravel and lichen crunching under her feet in her steady, rhythmic march.
These rounded stones and fallen obelisks she hikes past mark the burial grounds of ancient royal dynasties, their epitaphs worn away by unimaginable violence and immeasurable time, but she knows. She's been here many times before. She'll retrace her steps, drawing from instinct and childhood memory, clasping the silver canister as she clasped a warm brown hand every year as they climbed the hill together towards the top.
They are still together, now, she realises. She reaches the peak, pausing to look out over the valley at the endless miles of grey rock interrupted by mottled patches of yellow. A soft breeze dries the salt trails on her cheeks. She holds the canister a little tighter as her eyes wander to the rolling hills that reach up into stony mountains peaked with tips of snow. Her ship is a toy in the distance, dwarfed by the still-recognizable foundations of once-great architecture.
She turns and lowers her gaze to the softly curving pillar of sun-damaged marble before her, worn smooth and shapeless now, unrecognizable as the lifelike statue it was before. She traces her fingers where the face would be, runs her hand down the arm, grasping the rounded end of its stump.
"Hello, mother."
She used to come here every year, watching as her father's stormy grief ebbed away as a calm rain of wistful tears; ones that mirror her own, now. There is no anger left in her. She lowers her pack to the ground, setting the canister on the worn pedestal by his wife as she searches her bag for the simple collapsible shovel.
The first strike into dry, pebbly soil is shallow and difficult. The ground is as hard as life for one orphaned. She lifts the shovel, turns the dirt, and strikes again. And again.
It's hot, heavy work. Her body shakes with effort and her hands slip from sweat as she digs into the packed earth, occasionally reaching down to toss away some inconvenient stone and wishing she could do the same with her intrusive thoughts.
The days are longer now, she notes. It's been several vargas, but the shadows on the ground have barely crept the width of her small finger. As her gaze rises to the sky she sees the needle-thin arc of her people's greatest accomplishment floating broken overhead, severed into massive pieces now trapped in orbit. With the celestial rotator broken, the planet will eventually become tidally locked once more. Soon, or rather, in another 10,000 years, only one side will ever face the sun, and any life on the planet will be reduced to a small habitable ring of eternal twilight.
The hole is deeper and wider than the silver cylinder before she stops herself, still unsatisfied with its modesty. This is the grave of a beloved father and a great king, she thinks. There should be pallbearers carrying enormous falls of flowers on drapes of embroidered black silk during a long funeral procession as a capital city mourns its loss. But there is no one left to mourn. She is the inheritor of royal blood and holocaust. At the very least, her planet gives this burial the dignity of silence.
Too soon, the canister is in the hole and covered, and she's leaning against the hem of her mother's stone dress eating rations and thinking about juniberries. That's when the laughter, oddly, strikes her. That first fit of bubbling giggles that bursts forth from within her, mocking her own self-pity as she becomes aware of herself grasping at dirt and crying at the hem of her mother's dress once more.
Her palm itches.
Out from underneath the stone clambers a small, shiny black beetle, curious as to why it's been disturbed from its home. She marvels at it as she lowers it back to the ground and it scuttles away under another tuft of yellow foliage. Alive. Here and now, after 10,000 years. She was wrong about her homeland.
Moss. Beetles and moss. These are the survivors of armageddon, the true inheritors of her home planet. Able to survive the massive firestorm and endless radiation and the destruction of all other Altean life.
Or, perhaps not.
Why? Why would they all be dead? These are survivors, living proof of the indomitable spirit of her homeworld. And, perhaps, she thinks before stopping herself, others of her kind.
Spread out across endless distance and time, hiding, fighting, surviving like these brave beetles and their moss. She turns the stone over in her hand one more time as the shy creature scuttles away. Just because she cannot see them at first, cannot mean they're not there...
It's not enough. Not enough to just leave, and never return like she'd originally planned.
Scuffing the solid rock with her foot she finds what she's looking for. Flat and long and probably the foundation of some great and old building of long ago. She digs in her pack for the staff and holds it before her, activating the blazing blade on it and and sets herself to work.
The first cut goes deep. It's harder work than she thought as she drags the staff along, hot blade cutting and melting the ground as she carves strong lines and delicate curves. The smell of smoke and blistering earth burns her nose and still, she's not done yet. Sweat beads on her forehead and she tightens her grip, willing the last few strokes into existence with a calm deliberation.
And then it is done.
Those who come after her will know.
There below her rising ship, carved deep enough into solid rock to last another 10,000 years, the words lay, for any and all to see.
Altea Lives.