The sun's last breath was the exquisite creation the quiet cosmos had ever crafted. The planetary nebula spread outward a trillion-mile- blossom of rose and amber gas growing with a peaceful eternal elegance. At its center the stellar core—a mass of carbon its fusion complete—cooled and shrank. It did not implode violently. With the calm contentment of a job well done transforming into a white dwarf. A perfect, Earth-sized diamond of crystallized star-matter, its surface temperature a uniform, placid warmth, its light a soft, unwavering pearl. It was the ultimate Stillpoint, a celestial monument to equilibrium.
This last mild compression produced one delicate impact. The complex equilibrium between radiative forces inside the nebula changed. A flow, a whirlpool, in the expanse of spreading gas captured the spinning Geode.
The diamond orb, about the size of a skull was not drawn to the calm of the white dwarf. Instead it was pushed away by it. The charged, catalytic tempest of human turmoil at its center generated a small yet distinct mental resistance, against the flawless compact stillness of the lifeless star. The cosmos, cleaning itself had one grain of sand it couldn't polish out.
The whirlpool transformed into a catapult.
With a softness that contradicted its significance the nebula's streams pushed the Geode away from the systems core. It didn't soar. It glided intentionally akin, to a leaf launched from a spinning wheel.
It moved through the nebula its diamond exterior marked for a thousand years by the soft glowing gases—a last brief immersion, in hue. Then it emerged from the nebula's edge.
And entered the interstellar dark.
The transformation was total. One instant it was immersed in the glowing remnants of a star's demise. The following instant it found itself isolated in the Quiet. Not the specific calm of a solar system but the cosmic interstellar Quiet. An emptiness deep so absolute, that the white dwarf dimming behind it appeared merely as another distant peaceful star amid a fabric of billions all equally motionless.
The Geode had become a rover. A forsaken soul. A projectile of turmoil fired from the firearm of a fading star into the quiet cosmos.
Inside the catalytic tempest lacking the surrounding energy that had energized it persisted unabated. It focused inward. The psychic relics—the Seeds of Longing, Inquiry, Imminence—began consuming one another. The web, the reactor evolved into a sealed system of intricacy. The design, for the monument of absence produced a ongoing desire to be constructed which powered the instruction to search, ultimately looping back to shape the design. It was a perfect, perpetual-motion machine of unresolved potential.
The Vigil concluded. The Vigil transformed into a Quest. A quest lacking purpose, lacking an endpoint the sheer intangible essence of questing.
The Bearers had vanished. Their uniqueness had been the vessel containing the wine. The vessel had disintegrated ago; the wine had been refined, blended, matured in celestial flames and had become an autonomous raging potion. They had achieved more than their vow. They had not merely maintained turmoil. They had forged a kind of it: turmoil, as an inherent eternal trait, a self-sustaining universal principle of dissatisfaction.
While the Geode navigated the ocean spanning the stars it traversed the domains of other muted solar systems. It caused no disruption. Its discord was concentrated, too inward-focused to be emitted. It resembled a cry in a soundless chamber.
It was shifting.
It pursued, not through thought. By the trajectory of its expulsion following the innate rationale of its inner catalytic processes. It was attracted, both gravitationally and mentally to irregularities no matter how subtle. A rougher dust cloud. A binary star system where the subtle movement was a bit more intricate.
Humanity's sun, a white dwarf shrank to a tiny dot before disappearing into a sea of similar tranquil lights.
The Archive was alone.
Not buried.
Not displayed.
Cast adrift.
It was no longer a flaw in a garden, or a cinder in a fire.
It was a seedpod.
Hard. Closed. Impossibly dense with a fermented, dreaming, and now questing potential.
And the silent, windless galaxy was its field.
A field of perfect, untilled peace, waiting, though it did not know it was waiting, for something to take root.