Viltrumites did not reckon time as other races did. Their eyes did not glance toward clocks or calendars, nor did they measure their lives by the slow toll of bells or the rise and set of distant suns. The passing of days and hours meant little to beings for whom age was merely a quiet accrual of power rather than the erosion of strength. Where other peoples saw decay and felt mortality pressing in upon them like the weight of deep water, Viltrumites knew only a sharpening, a honing—a quiet refinement of sinew and bone.
For a race whose bones and muscles did not yield or fade beneath the weight of centuries, the standard measurements of time had long since lost all meaning. Hours and days slipped away, nothing more than grains of sand tumbling through empty hands. The sweep of decades and centuries were little more than shadows upon the face of an unmoving stone. Viltrumites, in their enduring lives, found themselves standing outside of time as lesser races understood it. Their bodies did not betray the slow corruption of cells; their blood and flesh did not falter, did not weaken. Instead, each passing year hardened their muscles, strengthened their bones, made every breath deeper, steadier.
And so, free from the shackles of time's usual measures, Viltrumites adopted their own private reckoning, unique and strange to all other creatures that walked or swam or soared beneath the countless stars. Thragg himself had never seen any race, however long-lived or wise, who measured moments as the Viltrumites did. They counted no ticks of mechanical gears, no revolutions of worlds, no slow circles of constellations against the darkness of the void.
Instead, Viltrumites measured time with the quiet rhythm of their own breathing.
A single exhale marked roughly one human week, the span of time a Viltrumite might comfortably empty his lungs of accumulated air. The average Viltrumite could drift through the cold vacuum of deep space, lungs tight and chest filled, holding a single breath for two long weeks before the next inhale was necessary. Thragg himself had long surpassed such thresholds. His lungs, powerful beyond reckoning, could hold their life-giving air far longer. He could drift untouched by time or atmosphere, suspended in darkness, his powerful body unperturbed by void or vacuum. Each quiet heartbeat echoed slowly through muscle and bone, patiently counting out increments no other creature could comprehend.
In the black and infinite silence between stars, Thragg's breath became the measure of all things. He moved through the emptiness with a grace no spacecraft could match, carried only by the strength of his own muscles and will. He watched solar systems drift and spin, saw nebulae unfold in slow blooms of scarlet and gold. The stars spread out before him like scattered embers against velvet cloth, silent and cold and distant. The void stretched infinite, uncaring of his passage, yet he moved forward without faltering, without hurry or hesitation. Each heartbeat, each subtle shift of muscle, carried him closer to his destination.
One breath, a single steady exhale, and a week had passed unseen beneath his drifting form.
Another breath, and distant stars shifted slightly, constellations changing their alignments as though bowing their heads to his passing.
On the third long-held breath, Thragg glimpsed the familiar shimmer of a distant sun, golden and soft-edged, its light spilling warmly onto familiar worlds. Home lay somewhere ahead, wrapped in the comforting blanket of its own atmosphere, hidden from prying eyes and wandering conquerors. A world where Nareena had walked, where his children waited in patient safety. Home—another idea that meant little to most Viltrumites yet had grown quietly important to him. He released the breath, air drifting silently from his parted lips, crystals of frozen vapor shimmering briefly before scattering to the blackness behind him.
Three breaths.
But this was not the home he knew.
The shape of the world was the same. The curve of its horizon, the color of its clouds, the quiet rotation under that sun. It turned just as it always had, slow and patient in its path around the star. From afar, it was the same sphere he had left behind. But as Thragg drifted closer, his sharp eyes caught the changes.
They were not subtle.
Satellites drifted in carefully managed orbits, small and dense and many in number. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Some bore long arms like insect limbs, bristling with antennae and sensor arrays. Others were sleek, armored, bearing gunports or hangars or solar wings spread wide. Among them loomed the mega-structures—orbital rings and tethered platforms, half-built towers reaching toward the void, and some kind of shipyard. He passed one of them at speed and eyed the thick hulls, vast landing bays lit by harsh floodlights, human silhouettes moving across gantries and scaffolds. It groaned faintly in the silence of space, beams flexing as it held its place above the world.
Below, the surface told its own story.
The junkfields were gone. Where once lay endless stretches of rust and broken hulls, of dead engines and skeletal machinery half-buried in wind-swept dust, there were now roads and cities. The old steppes remained, but only in patches. Thin green scars where the grass still fought to grow. The rest had been scraped clean and paved over, consumed by concrete and steel and rising towers. Whole urban sprawls lay stitched across the planet's face, spreading out from central spires like the roots of a machine-borne tree. Highways carved through the old lands. Trains moved in silver streaks along magnetized rails. Lights pulsed in grids where none had existed before.
Thragg hovered there, watching it turn beneath him, arms loose at his sides. His eyes tracked every detail. He could see the shimmer of plasma engines lifting small craft from landing pads, the trails of atmospheric ships descending from orbit. A broadcast array spun slowly on the rim of one mountain range, and somewhere farther east, a colossal structure sat embedded in the crust like a fortress built by giants. It bled with light and industry.
This was not how he left it.
He let out a slow breath, cold vapor spiraling into the dark behind him. Time, he thought. He had expected its trick. He had not expected this much of it. A handful of years perhaps. A generation, at worst. But this—this was more. Decades, perhaps centuries, depending on the dilation. The flow of time moved differently in the void between stars, slower for him as he sped across the cosmos. The light of stars bent around him, the years slid past, and this world had moved on without him.
He blinked, watching a new settlement flicker into view on the edge of a desert he once knew. That desert had stretched unbroken to the horizon in his memory, filled with wreckage and silence. Now, towers stood there. He saw cranes. He saw columns of smoke and movement. Cities where none had been. Names he wouldn't recognize.
He drifted closer, lowering his altitude in slow, quiet descent. Wind pressed against him as he entered the atmosphere, the blue sky parting for his form. He passed over a canyon that had once marked a great salvage yard. It was gone now, filled in and built over. Only the shape of the land beneath the roads betrayed the memory of what had been there.
Thragg frowned. He turned his gaze toward the old plateau. The one she liked. He used to find her there, arms outstretched, fingers skimming the wind as it rushed over the cliff edge. He wondered if the cliff was still there. He doubted it.
The cities had swallowed much. Roads that broke the spine of old ranges. Towers that pierced the earth like teeth. From up here, he saw only the sprawl—steel and stone laid across the face of the world in lines and arcs and settlements, humming with movement. The clouds drifted thinly, veiling the light from below. Somewhere beneath them were the old places, but their bones had been buried beneath the weight of progress. And memory.
Thragg remained above the cloudbank, unmoving. Hands curled into loose fists at his sides. His cape flared gently behind him, caught in the thin wind. The sun crept low on the world's edge, dragging long shadows over the curvature of the planet. Cities dimmed beneath its light. The sky changed hue. He stared in silence, letting the light wash over him, gold fading into gray, a slow shifting of color that spoke to time's quiet cruelty.
Among his kind—those who could live a thousand years and still swing a fist like it was day one—there was a strange irony. They who had no use for clocks or calendars were the most reluctant to change. Age meant nothing, but the world did not wait for them. The future had no regard for endurance. Viltrumites bent time with their bodies, but time still crept past them in the shifting of rivers, the falling of cities, the building of new ones in their place.
He did not like what had become of this world. Not because it was foreign, but because it was familiar and wrong. Like a face remembered in childhood, returned to in old age, and found different in every detail. The heart remembers things the world does not.
Still, he knew the shape of the land. Mountains did not lie. The spine of them twisted in the same pattern he recalled. Peaks where they should be. Valleys where they once carved wind through stone. And there, nestled in the crook of that range, should have been his old home. A simple house, once. Built into the side of the slope, hidden from the eyes of satellites and soldiers alike. It had burned, of course. The Rangdan had seen to that. Fire and shrapnel and smoke. Nothing left. Not even the foundation. But he remembered the land.
That was where she would be.
Argall and Syreen would have seen to it. Nareena always–always–wanted to be buried in their garden when she inevitably passed. She spoke of it so much that everyone in the family knew it by heart.
Thragg exhaled. The sound vanished in the clouds.
He turned slowly in the air and began to descend.
The wind thickened around him, pressed against his chest and shoulders like a living thing. Vapor streaked across his limbs, caught in the folds of his cape. The clouds broke beneath him, parted like thin cloth. The world opened below. Gray stone. Green patches. Lines of metal and blacktop drawn across the skin of the earth like scars. Towers cut through the valley floors. Rail-lines shimmered in the heat. The pulse of civilization drummed steady below, engines churning in their subterranean veins.
He followed the ridgelines first. The bones of the land still knew their place even if the flesh had changed. He drifted low, eyes tracking familiar curves in the hills, old paths now hidden under pavement and settlement. Roads coiled where game trails once ran. Solar farms lay where the tall grass used to bend. He moved without sound above them, his shadow long in the early light, passing over rooftops and antennae, over busy streets and cold glass windows.
And then he found it.
The hill was still there.
It rose up like a knuckle in the earth, stubborn and unmoved. Trees had grown thicker along its slope. The wild undergrowth had been trimmed back. The stone path he had once carved with his own hands—now covered in moss, overgrown at the edges—still wound toward the summit. But the house he had built was gone. In its place stood another. Broader. Stronger. Constructed with steel supports and reinforced windows. Not ornate, but not plain either. A lived-in home. A real one.
And yet, in spite of the changes, something of the old still lingered.
At the edge of the yard was the garden. Nareena's garden. Once wild and soft with the touch of her hands. The plants had changed, but the shape remained. Rows curved just as she had laid them. The soil turned in that same gentle arc. The stone bench still sat beneath the arching tree, its bark marked by time. Even the great stones he had hauled down from the mountains remained in their places, half-buried now in the earth. He remembered each one. He had carried them without effort but placed them with care. She had planted flowers around them, vines that once curled along their edges. Now the vines were gone, but the stone endured.
He hovered a dozen meters above the clearing, the wind tugging lightly at him. Below, the front door of the new house opened.
They stepped out slowly. One by one. Men. Women. Children. All of them paused in the yard and looked up. None carried weapons. None shouted or ran. Their clothes were plain. Hands shaded eyes. Faces turned toward him. He saw no fear there. Only silence. Caution, maybe. Wonder.
He did not recognize them.
Yet there was something in their features that stirred a thread in him. All their faces were oddly familiar.
And then the last came out.
She moved slow, steady, leaning on a cane. Her back was bent, her skin folded with the weight of many years. Hair like ash. Wrinkles like cracked earth. She stepped into the sun, blinked up at him, and smiled.
"Hello, Dad," she said. "Glad to have you back."
AN: Chapter 69 is out on (Pat)reon!