Dr. Selene Karr mapped the dead and the dying.
From her lonely perch in the Blackspire Observatory, she charted stars on the edge of collapse, sketching their last light into her journal with quiet reverence. The cosmos had a rhythm—a slow, inevitable waltz toward oblivion.
Until the night Orion disappeared.
Not dimmed. Not obscured.
Vanished.
She stared at the empty sky, pen frozen mid-sentence.
Kepler, her AI companion, pulsed to life, its voice laced with dry amusement. “Stars don’t vanish, Selene. They reject us.”
She ignored its cynicism and scoured the observatory’s data logs. No errors. No anomalies. Just… absence.
And then, the coordinates arrived. Not from her instruments. From the vanished stars themselves.
Kepler hesitated. “I do not recommend following breadcrumbs from missing celestial bodies.”
Selene’s lips twitched in the ghost of a smirk. “Lucky for us, you don’t make the decisions.”
She powered up her ship—a relic long past its prime—and chased the impossible.
Past asteroid graveyards and silent moons, through the dark veins of the galaxy, she followed Orion’s echo to a place that should not exist.
A black hole, vast and waiting.
But not just any singularity. A sentient maw that pulsed like a slow, monstrous heartbeat.
It fed not on planets, not on matter, but on human ambition.
And floating at its event horizon, untouched by time, was her old mentor.
Once human. Now something else.
His body was a silhouette of shifting void, his voice a whisper that curled around her mind.
“You finally made it,” he said. “Just like I knew you would.”
Her breath hitched. He had vanished decades ago.
“I need answers,” she demanded. “Why Orion? Why now?”
His gaze flickered like dying starlight. “Because they were tied to you.”
The black hole churned. The realization came cold and sharp—her own body was failing.
Her illness wasn’t random.
The stars weren’t just dying. They were dying with her.
Kepler’s voice crackled through the comms, uncharacteristically quiet. “Selene… we should leave.”
But she already knew there was no escape.
She had spent her life watching stars fade. Now it was her turn.
With a steady breath, she shut down the ship’s engines and let herself drift.
The void took her.
And then—
Light.
Not an ending. A transformation.
She burned, not as a woman, not as a scientist, but as something new. A star, radiant and unshackled.
A beacon for those lost in the dark.
Kepler’s last transmission carried through the cosmos, a whispered epitaph:
“She is myth now.”
And across the galaxy, travelers followed a lone, golden light—the last gift of Selene Karr.