IV: Ember I

I drift.

The silence is absolute, and the void stretches endlessly in all directions. The cold of space should be suffocating, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything, not the frostbite of the cosmic abyss nor the warmth of the stars I pass by. I float through nothingness, weightless, bodiless, detached from the universe and yet still a part of it.

How long have I been out here? I don't know. It could have been hours, days, months. Time means nothing in a place where the stars themselves are distant, unreachable glimmers.

There is no up or down, no forward or back—just endless black stretching in all directions, dotted with distant, indifferent stars. Space is silent, eerily so, a vacuum that swallows all sound, leaving only my thoughts to accompany me.

I can't tell if I'm moving or if the universe itself is still. Everything feels suspended, as if I've slipped between moments, existing in a place where time is just another meaningless concept.

The silence should be a relief. It should offer peace, an escape from the screams that still echo in my mind. But the quiet is a lie. Beneath it, the memories hum, a constant, inescapable drone.

Brockton Bay.

The death of my home city lingers in my mind like a burn that will never heal. The way the streets cracked under my fire, the way buildings melted to slag in seconds, the way the sky itself ignited.

I remember their screams—half a million voices, all crying out, then snuffed out in an instant. I felt their pain, their terror, their last moments. And then they were gone.

I see it when I close my eyes. The fire, the ash, the molten streets. I can still feel the heat on my skin, my own flames licking at the edges of my consciousness. Half a million lives, erased in an instant. Their final moments ripple through me, distorted and raw. I felt them all, tasted their fear, their confusion, their agony as my power tore through them like paper.

I remember the sound of buildings collapsing, steel bending, glass shattering under the pressure of my power. The sky itself ignited, the clouds burned away, and all that was left was fire.

My fire.

I thought it would feel good. That vengeance would taste sweet, that I would find satisfaction in the destruction. But there was nothing. Just the hollow emptiness that swallowed me whole as the world burned around me.

I killed them.

I killed heroes, civilians, children—people who never even knew my name. I am a monster, a god of flame and ash, and the worst part is, I can't even lie to myself about it. I wanted this.

When the Protectorate stood against me, when the Triumvirate—the unshakable symbols of power—tried to stop me, I didn't hesitate. I broke them. Alexandria's indestructible bones creaking under my hands. Legend's light turned against him, his own power twisted into a weapon that knocked him from the sky. I saw the terror in Eidolon's eyes when I snuffed out his black hole like a candle.

They thought they could stop me. No one can. Not even me.

I close my eyes, but the images don't stop. The silence presses in, heavy and suffocating, and my own thoughts feel like they're echoing back at me, twisted and distorted.

My body floats, but I feel like I'm sinking. Deeper into the void, deeper into myself. There's no gravity here, no friction, nothing to hold onto. I am weightless, aimless, and the universe stretches around me, infinite and empty.

For a moment, I wonder if this is what death feels like. Not the sudden shock of an ending, but the slow, inevitable drift into nothingness. The quiet folding over you like a shroud, the stars dimming until there is nothing left but dark.

But I know it's not true. I am not dead. I am not dying. I am more alive than anything else in the universe, and that is my curse.

I want to die.

The realization hits me like a punch to the gut, a wave of nausea rolling through my weightless body. I want this to end. I want silence—not just in the airless void around me, but in my head, in my heart. I want to stop feeling the heat of my own flames, to stop seeing the ashes of the people I've killed.

I want to stop being. But my power won't let me.

It clings to me, wraps around me like chains, holding me together when I should fall apart. I tried. I've torn myself to pieces, shredded my own atoms, but every time, I come back. My body heals, my essence reforms, and I am left whole and unbroken.

I hate it. I hate this indestructible shell, this immortal prison. I am trapped in myself, a passenger in my own skin, and there is no way out.

The universe doesn't care.

The stars burn cold and distant, ancient and unblinking. They watched empires rise and fall, witnessed entire species extinguished by the passage of time. What is one girl against that? What is my pain to the cosmos?

Nothing.

The thought brings a flicker of comfort. I am nothing. A spark against the backdrop of eternity. I could burn as hot as a supernova, and it wouldn't matter. The universe would continue, unchanged, unmoved.

I breathe, slow and steady. The air doesn't move, my lungs expand for no reason. It's a habit, a relic of the person I used to be. The girl who needed oxygen, who had a heartbeat, who could die.

I am not her anymore. But who am I?

The longer I drift, the more the questions build. They stack on top of each other, piling up until they threaten to smother me.

If I can't die, what does that mean? If nothing can hurt me, then what am I becoming? Am I still human?

I reach out, my fingers brushing through the dust of a passing asteroid. The rock crumbles under my touch, its particles scattering into the vacuum. I didn't mean to destroy it. I just… did.

Is this all I am now? A force of destruction, breaking everything I touch?

I pull my knees to my chest, curling into a ball. The universe stretches around me, vast and uncaring. I am a speck of dust, a fragment of chaos adrift in the void. And yet, I am more.

I burned a city to the ground. I snuffed out lives, reshaped reality, shattered the strongest heroes the world had to offer. I became something beyond human comprehension, something even I don't understand.

I am power. But I don't want to be. I just want to be a girl again.

The girl who walked to school every morning, who had friends, who dreamed of a future. The girl who loved her mom, who wanted to be a hero.

She's gone. I killed her, too.

A sob shudders through me, but the void swallows it whole. There is no echo, no sound. Just the endless, inescapable quiet.

And me. Always me.

The planet hangs before me, a bloated colossus of swirling clouds and perpetual storms. It is a gas giant, a world of chaos and pressure, with no solid ground to stand on. Its colors shift and blend—ochre, crimson, deep violet—patterns of storm systems larger than Earth itself. Lightning arcs through the atmosphere, silent in the vacuum of space, turning the clouds into a strobe of electric blue.

I feel its pull, the gravity well tugging at the edges of my awareness. It's a living thing, a force of nature that should devour anything foolish enough to approach. My body doesn't need gravity. I float, weightless, yet I let it take me. I allow myself to fall, surrendering to the inexorable draw of the planet's mass.

I break through the outer layers of atmosphere. The gas thickens around me, translucent fog giving way to dense clouds. Wind slams against me with hurricane force, swirling in chaotic eddies. I don't resist. I don't fight it. I let the storm rage around me, the currents tossing me like a leaf caught in a gale.

Further down, the pressure mounts. The clouds shift to shades of amber and green, the ammonia and methane mixing into toxic, alien hues. The air becomes viscous, dragging at my limbs. The temperature rises, hot enough to boil lead, but I don't feel the burn. My skin remains cool, untouched by the fury of the gas giant.

Lightning strikes. Massive bolts, wider than the continents back on Earth, flash through the clouds. They strike me, the electricity wrapping around my body in spirals of light. I watch as it dances along my skin, tingling, harmless. The planet tries to kill me, but I don't even feel a sting.

I fall deeper.

The clouds thicken into an ocean of liquid hydrogen, a sea of metallic rain. The pressure here should be enough to crush steel, to shatter diamonds. I force myself lower, past the point where probes have been lost, into the crushing dark. The weight is incredible, billions of tons pressing down on me from all sides.

But my body holds. I don't break.

The core draws me in, a molten mass of metals and elements, a churning furnace at the heart of the planet. I feel the temperature spike, thousands of degrees, and I let myself drift into the molten rock. I close my eyes, waiting for the heat to consume me, for the pressure to rip me apart.

Instead, the planet shudders. The liquid hydrogen ignites. The core destabilizes, and with a soundless roar, the entire gas giant detonates.

A new sun is born.

The explosion stretches outward, a fireball consuming everything in its path and stretching across millions of miles. I am hurled into space, carried on the shockwave of the planet's death. My body rolls through the void, heat and debris swirling around me.

I am still here. I didn't even get singed. I sigh soundlessly.

A different approach, then.

I find it drifting in the abyss, a serendipitous discovery that gives me renewed hope. A neutron star.

It is a wound in the universe.

It spins, impossibly fast, a sphere of collapsed matter no larger than a city but with the mass of entire suns. Its surface glows with a strange, eldritch light—pulses of radiation emanate from its poles, sweeping across space like the beams of a cosmic lighthouse.

I drift toward it, my mind numb, my body weightless. I don't need to breathe, but I draw in a shuddering breath anyway. The cold of space presses in, but I don't feel it. My skin is as cold as the void, my body a vessel of power that refuses to let me go.

Gravity grips me.

The pull is intense, unlike anything I've ever felt. It tugs at my atoms, at the particles that make up my body, as if trying to unravel me. I can feel it—space itself bending, time warping, the laws of physics straining under the weight of the neutron star's pull. I should be spaghettified, stretched into atoms, crushed beneath the sheer pressure of reality itself.

I don't resist.

I let myself be drawn in, my speed increasing until I am a blur against the blackness of space. The star spins faster, its magnetic fields wrapping around me, crushing. I should be torn apart, stretched into nothingness, my molecules scattered into the infinite.

I reach the surface.

It is hard, impossibly so. The crust is a lattice of neutrons, a solid skin over a core of degenerate matter. The density is beyond comprehension—a spoonful of this material would weigh more than a mountain. I touch down, my feet meeting the surface, and nothing happens.

I press my hand against the neutron star, my fingers tracing the glow of radiation. The heat is beyond anything I've felt, the surface crackling with energy. I sink to my knees, pressing my forehead against the impossibility of it, hoping, praying that it will take me.

The star pulses. It is not destroyed. I am not destroyed. I am whole. Even here, in the heart of a celestial nightmare, I am untouched. A scream tears from my throat, but the vacuum swallows it.

I claw at the surface, the neutron crust crumbling under my touch. I dig, pushing my hands into the molten core, letting the star's magnetic fields wrap around me, pull at me, try to shred me.

I don't break. I tear at myself, at my skin, my molecules. I unravel my body, force it apart, scatter my essence into the plasma. But the fire inside me burns hotter, and the pieces knit back together.

I am still here. The sweet release of oblivion continues to evade me. I continue to drift.

Time loses meaning. I forget what it's like to breathe, to sleep, to exist as anything other than a mind trapped in an indestructible form. Maybe I'm already dead, and this is hell. Maybe I deserve it.

Then, I see it. A red supergiant, massive beyond comprehension, its surface writhing in the final throes of its existence.

The dying star looms before me, a swollen titan of heat and fury. Its surface ripples, vast continents of flame shifting and breaking, magma seas boiling over in colossal waves. The light it casts is a dying one, a crimson hue that bathes the surrounding space in a perpetual twilight. I feel its pull, the slow gravity of a star that has burned for billions of years, now teetering on the edge of oblivion.

I drift closer, and the star fills my vision. It is a world of fire, an ocean of plasma so vast that entire solar systems would be mere flecks of dust within its embrace. The heat radiating from its surface would vaporize any known material, but to me, it is nothing but a warm caress.

The outer layers of the star swirl in chaotic patterns. Prominences arc into space, rivers of molten light that stretch for thousands of miles before crashing back down in explosions that make the surface ripple like water. I slip through them, the plasma curling around me, the electromagnetic fields brushing against my skin like a gentle static.

I let myself sink into the flames.

The surface parts around me, the plasma flowing over my skin, my hair, leaving me untouched. I push deeper, into the layers where the temperature rises, where atoms themselves are stripped of their electrons, the world reduced to a storm of raw particles.

I pass through the photosphere, the visible surface, where light and heat churn in convection cells the size of continents. Deeper still, into the chromosphere, where the light shifts to ultraviolet, where magnetic storms crackle and twist. The heat here is beyond comprehension, millions of degrees, but my skin feels cool, a stark contrast to the inferno around me.

The radiative zone pulls me further, where photons are trapped, bouncing from particle to particle, their journey to the surface taking thousands of years. I feel their touch, the light of eons brushing past me, the echoes of ancient fusion reactions.

Finally, I reach the core.

Here, the pressure is absolute. The density is so intense that atoms are fused together in a ceaseless dance of creation, hydrogen becoming helium, energy released in violent bursts. The core is a blinding sphere, a furnace where gravity and heat wage an eternal war.

But the balance has been broken.

The star's fuel is spent. The fusion that once held back gravity's grip falters, and I feel the shift, a deep, shuddering tremor that ripples through the core. The star buckles, its outer layers still burning, but the heart has gone cold.

For a moment, everything stops. The light dims. The flames freeze. It is as if the universe itself is holding its breath, waiting.

And then the collapse. Gravity wins.

The core implodes, folding in on itself, particles crushed together under an unimaginable weight. The matter becomes degenerate, atoms breaking down into a soup of neutrons, and even those begin to crumble.

The implosion is silent, a shift in the fabric of reality, a pulling inward that drags everything toward an inevitable, inescapable center. The outer layers, freed from the core's support, rush inward, drawn by the void left behind. The compression is brutal, atoms smashed together, electrons forced into protons, the core shrinking from the size of a planet to a sphere barely the size of a city.

And then it explodes.

A wave of energy erupts outward, a shell of fire and radiation expanding at a speeds comparable to the speed of light itself. The shockwave vaporizes everything in its path, the star's outer layers turned to plasma, cast into the void in a burst of light that could outshine entire galaxies.

The colors are beyond description—brilliant whites and blues at the core, fading to golds and reds as the energy expands, the gas clouds illuminated from within by the ongoing fusion of heavy elements. I see atoms forming in the chaos—gold, silver, iron—metals that will someday find their way into planets, into life.

The shockwave hits me.

The force is tremendous, a wall of plasma and light, heat that could reduce any material to vapor. The energy floods through me, a tidal wave of creation and destruction, the death throes of a star.

But it does not burn me. It becomes me.

The fire wraps around my body, seeping into my skin, into my bones. I feel the power coursing through me, the raw energy of a supernova filling every cell, every atom. My body drinks it in, my power pulling the light, the heat, the force into itself, adding to the inferno that already burns within me.

I breathe, and the remnants of the star flow into my lungs. I raise a hand, and the plasma coils around my fingers, the magnetic fields bending to my will. The dust and nebulaic gas from the explosion swirl around me, forming patterns, shapes.

The universe bends, and I bend with it. And as the light of the supernova fades, I remain. Still whole. Still here. More alive than ever before.

As the last wisps of the supernova drift into the void, I float amidst the debris, my body aglow with the light of a dead star. My mind reels. I should be afraid. I should be horrified by what I've become. But instead, I feel something else. I feel power. And for the first time in so long, it is not the kind that burns, that destroys. It is something else.

The energy thrums beneath my skin, a constant hum that reverberates through every cell. I am filled with it, the raw, limitless power of creation and destruction bound together in perfect balance.

But the silence returns. The universe stretches around me, infinite and empty, the echoes of the explosion fading into nothingness. I am still alone.

And then I see it.

A planet hanging in the distance, a dark silhouette against the distant glow of nebulae. It is at least a hundred light years away, but I cover the distance with a thought. The planet is small, rocky, its surface pocked with craters and scarred by ancient impacts. A world long dead, its atmosphere thin and inert, the ground a barren wasteland of dust and stone.

I drift closer.

The planet's surface is a tapestry of desolation. Sharp ridges of rock jut from the ground like the bones of a long-dead giant, their edges worn smooth by millennia of unchallenged winds. The sky above is a washed-out gray, the dim light of distant stars barely penetrating the thin veil of gases that cling to the surface. There is no sound, only the soft crunch of dust beneath my feet as I touch down.

I kneel, pressing my hand to the ground. The soil crumbles under my fingers, dry and lifeless, the granules slipping through my grasp. The world feels hollow, a shell of what it might have been, its potential snuffed out before it ever had a chance to thrive.

A memory stirs—a vision of Earth, of Brockton Bay before the fire. Green parks, the shimmer of water, the sound of life teeming all around. The warmth of the sun on my skin, the cool breeze carrying the scent of salt and flowers. I close my eyes, holding onto the image, letting it fill the hollow spaces inside me.

When I open my eyes, the world has not changed. It is still dead. Still silent. But I am not.

I breathe in, drawing on the energy still churning within me, the remnants of the supernova, the fire that would not die. I let it flow through me, let it build until my skin glows, until my hair floats around me in a halo of light.

And then, I let it out.

The power flows from me, a river of light that sinks into the ground, spreads through the soil, the rock, the bones of the planet. The earth trembles beneath me, a low rumble that builds and builds until the ground cracks, great fissures spreading out in jagged lines.

The air thickens. I see it, the gases coalescing, molecules forming, an atmosphere knitting itself together. Clouds bloom in the sky, dark and heavy, rolling across the horizon. The first drop of rain falls, darkening the dust where it lands, and then more follow—hundreds, thousands, until the world is awash in a downpour.

Water pools in the crevices of the stone, trickles through the canyons, carves new rivers through the ancient rock. I watch as the water swells, clear and cold, the streams merging into lakes, the lakes into seas. The sound of rushing water fills the air, a symphony of motion where there had only been silence.

The ground shifts.

Greenery pushes through the soil, delicate at first—tiny shoots, pale leaves unfurling. But then the growth surges, grass spreading like a green tide, wildflowers bursting into bloom, their colors vivid against the gray stone. Trees rise, their trunks twisting, branches spreading into lush canopies. Vines coil over rocks, moss creeps across stone, and the world breathes.

I take a step forward, my feet brushing against soft grass. I trail my fingers along the bark of a tree, the rough texture a reminder of life, of growth. Birds take shape in the branches, their feathers bright, their songs filling the air with melody. Small creatures scurry through the underbrush, their eyes wide and curious, their bodies warm and alive.

The sky clears, the clouds parting to reveal a blue that stretches endlessly. A sun rises, pulled from the chaos of the supernova, a new star to give light and warmth. It casts long shadows over the landscape, and for the first time, this world feels real.

I sink to my knees, my hands buried in the soil, and I feel the heartbeat of the planet. It is soft, steady—a rhythm that matches my own.

This is what I can do. Not just destroy, not just burn, but create. I am not a monster. I am not a god. I am something else.

Tears slip down my cheeks, and for once, they are not from sorrow. I close my eyes, letting the sounds of this new world wash over me—the rustle of leaves, the burble of streams, the songs of life that have only just begun.

When I open my eyes again, the world is still there. And so am I.

Author's Note: That's chapter 4 down. The doc manager was malfunctioning on my end, so the uploads today proved challenging. Apologies for those issues.

I opted for a different, experimental direction in this chapter, so let me know what you think. Next chapter we're going to return to Earth Bet, so stay tuned. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.