The Air I’ll Leave You

In the endless silence between stars, rituals take on a different shape. Out here, farewells were not spoken aloud—they happened in the measured press of a gloved hand, the slow release of precious dust, the patient attention of a lone witness far from any world. The universe rarely noticed. Yet in these acts, something of meaning briefly flickered, like static against the cosmic background—like the rare shimmer of light refracted by floating motes of ash or the whisper of air teetering on the edge of being lost forever.

Nolan stood in the cramped bathroom of the Silent Void, his head bowed as the hum of the ship filled the quiet space. The small "head," was sterile and utilitarian, its brushed metal surfaces reflecting the dim overhead light. The disposal chute was open just to his left, a rectangular slot waiting in silence. In his hands was the small, unadorned container holding what remained of his father. The vessel was simple: dull gray, cold to the touch, its weight far heavier than its size suggested. Dressed in his usual shipboard attire, Nolan felt the suffocating stillness of the moment as he prepared to let go.

Nolan looked down at the canister. In its reflection, he spotted only the faintest flicker of his own eyes, as if the light within him, carefully guarded for decades, was slowly leaking away. Beyond the rim of the ship, the blue brilliance of the Aletheion Supergiant washed over everything—a cold, radiant witness to rites both strange and eternal. That brilliant starlight found its way through every cut and gap of the hull, throwing prismatic refractions against the curved surface, reminding Nolan that even in the absence of air, light could dance in a hundred broken colors.

The journey here, both physical and emotional, had been longer than distance could measure. He hadn’t set foot on Argos for years, and when he did, it was more like stepping into a museum of his worst memories than returning home. The modest residential blocks, once enormous from the vantage point of a terrified child, shrank beneath the weight of his adulthood. Paint peeled from every fence. The same old fruit vendor nodded from his wobbly stand, and even the sagging spaceport canteen seemed caught in a perpetual yawn.

His sister, Maris, had changed less than he expected. Her posture was still alert, her speech quick and precise, but her hair—longer and threaded with silver—seemed like a subtle badge of what they’d both survived. They spent three days together. The house, shuttered since their father’s passing, exhaled dust but little warmth. The air inside was still, carrying the stagnant remnants of old disappointments. Memories crowded each room, their father’s presence as tangible as the sun brushed photographs on the mantelpiece. They didn’t speak of their childhood, not directly, but the pauses between conversations grew longer as if nostalgia’s undertow threatened to drag them down.

On the last day, Maris presented him with the canister. He remembered her hands trembling for only an instant as she pressed it into his palm. “He should be with you,” she’d said, not asking, not pleading. Her face was unreadable. He wanted to say something meaningful, but all he managed was a nod—the kind of silent understanding that only two survivors might share after a war. The air between them hung heavy, filled with unsaid words and the ghost of their father’s rules.

The ashes had traveled with him ever since, riding the Silent Void through nebulae, arcane gravitational eddies, and the endless quiet corridors between stars. For months, he had kept the container resting atop the dashboard in the cockpit like a grim companion. Sometimes, during longer jumps, he pressed his thumb against the lid, half-expecting some warmth of spirit to pass through. The light from the dashboard displays and the distant stars overhead often caught on the heavy elements inside, sending a curtain of shattered colors splaying across the cockpit. It was a sight born of emptiness and refracted hope.

The vessel itself was a home of sorts, though it too felt like a mausoleum more often than not. Every corridor curved gently, walls padded against the cosmos’s apathy and lined with utilitarian lighting strips. The air purifiers thrummed quietly—a constant reminder that life in space was measured in breaths. The rec room still smelled faintly of plastiform coffee, a trick of memory or faulty air filters. The cockpit, enclosed by a seamless dome of reinforced polyglass, offered a view both breathtaking and unbearable: the Velorum Galaxy, strewn with wonders, yet incapable of filling the emptiness he carried.

In those endless hours, Nolan often reflected on his father. He thought of the man’s looming shadow, the eyes that seemed to weigh achievements and failures with cold precision. As a boy, Nolan had memorized every tiny shift in his father’s demeanor. That frown when he knocked over a lamp. The sharp correction of his posture, the inflexible rules whose logic remained forever out of reach. Worse—his father’s preferential treatment, which played brother and sister against each other for affection, a currency distributed in vanishingly small increments. Maris, always on the outside. Nolan, always on an invisible pedestal that felt like a scaffold.

And his mother—he’d crafted stories in which her absence was his father’s fault, not the pox’s. Even now, reason did battle with childhood resentment, as if one would ever fully win out. The night their mother died, Nolan had clung to the hope his father would come into the cramped, fever-bright room and reassure them both. He never did. His father sat by the window, staring into the deep Argos dusk, lost in his own unknowable calculus. The air in the house that night felt heavy—unmoving, almost sacred in its finality.

Nolan’s life since had been orbit after orbit—around his pain, around the memory of what a family might have been. He sought spectacle, awe, and distraction. Once, deep in the shadow of a sleeping planet, he skimmed the edge of an event horizon. The ship’s alarms blared as relativity stretched minutes into unmeasured hours. He tried, in that suspended eternity, to conjure pride—his own, his father’s, anyone’s—but the only response was the grave silence of space and the whisper of recycled air filtering through the ship’s lungs, untouched by any approval or consolation.

Later, drifting near a binary system, he witnessed the extraordinary: a neutron star merger. The collision birthed a newborn black hole, and its radiation lit up the darkness in screaming colors—ultraviolet, cerulean, violet—streaming through the ship’s dome and splintering in sudden bursts as they refracted off the orbital glass. The sight left him breathless, awed and infinitesimal—a mere traveler in a universe that neither condemned nor redeemed.

Perhaps his proudest moment—the one he never reported to a soul—was his passage through the Orpheum Nebula. The ship sent ripples through the luminous gas plumes, clouds interlaced with elements that would, over eons, collapse into stars. He imagined those stars as a kind of legacy: life from disturbance, generation from the smallest nudge. Nolan fancied that maybe, somehow, his father’s ashes might mingle with those primordial clouds, their atoms sewn into the tapestry of future worlds. It was a poetic thought, immediately dismissed—but one that comforted him in the quiet that followed. The nebula’s colors had washed over the Silent Void, filling its recycled airspace with subtle, shifting hues—remnants of light made tangible in a place otherwise starved of warmth.

Tonight, as the blue supergiant’s crystalline light painted long shadows across the hull, Nolan knew he could procrastinate no longer. He cradled the container and knelt beside the disposal port—the ship’s gateway to the void. He rested his gloved fingertips on the ridged surface of the canister, closing his eyes. His father’s face sprang to mind—not the stern mask he wore for most of Nolan’s childhood, but a vulnerable, uncertain flicker glimpsed only once: the day he realized, far too late, that he’d lost both wife and children to different kinds of distance.

Nolan’s thoughts flickered to Maris. He wondered if she, too, carried a weight as vast as his own, whether her nights aboard the little shuttle she commandeered were haunted by sidelong glances into darkness. She had never once voiced bitterness, at least not in his presence, yet he suspected her forgiveness was a survival mechanism rather than a true reprieve. The air in her shuttle was likely just as scrubbed, just as thin, as his own, but Nolan doubted either of them could ever clear the past from their lungs.

His mouth dry, his hand trembling with the slow dread of farewell, Nolan opened the container over the disposal port. Ashes clung stubbornly inside—a lifetime resisting the journey into exile. In microgravity, he had to coax them out, tapping gently, nudging what was left of the man who shaped him with equal measures of discipline and mystery. The particles dispersed slowly, spinning into the air with a languid grace. He watched, mesmerized, as the blue light refracted through the dust—carbon and magnesium and iron glittering like a thousand fractured hopes, a spectrum unleashed within the ship’s most sacred space.

The ashes rode invisible currents, tumbling gently in the chamber’s weighted silence. Each mote was illuminated by the blue-white star, shifting colors across the spectrum, a galaxy in miniature. Nolan’s breath caught in his throat as the recycled air in his suit moved past his lips, a reminder that every exhale was precious in a place where losing air meant losing life. He felt time dilate, that peculiar stretching of seconds into memory. He saw, superimposed over the drifting remnants, flickers of Argos sunlight—childhood streets, his mother’s gentle hands, Maris’s laughter somewhere far behind him.

At last, when all the ashes had drifted from the canister, Nolan lingered a moment longer with the empty vessel, its inside dusted in the faintest traces of the past—a memory even the ship’s purifiers could not quite erase. Was it lighter? He couldn’t tell. With a last, conflicted sigh, he set it aside.

The automated system—a marvel of functional engineering—activated at his gesture. Quiet mechanical noises shivered through the hull as the port sealed, a suction pulling the suspended particles into a vacuum bag. He heard the air rushing back into the life support system, a cycle as old as any space ritual. The tiniest wisps of light scattered, collapsing inward as the mechanism wrung every atom of air from the chamber.

His father wouldn’t need the air anymore.

The systems finished with a final, approving chime, leaving Nolan alone with the vastness outside and the bareness within. He stayed, crouched by the port, his gaze sinking into the infinite black. He was searching, though he wasn’t sure for what—absolution, forgiveness, the freedom to move forward. Every moment was punctuated by the ever-present background whisper of the recycled air, weaving through filters that could never quite cleanse the ache inside.

But nothing changed. The universe did not mark this release. Stars continued their distant burning; the ship’s silent companion lights blinked as they always had. Nolan waited for grief or relief—some catharsis to break over him and reshape the edges of his soul.

Instead, silence reigned, broken only by the soft hum of the Silent Void’s life support cycling air that no longer had anyone left to draw breath and the slant of refracted starlight painting pale colors along the inside of his visor. He stood up, exhaustion curling through his limbs. Above, the Velorum galaxy arched itself across the ship’s viewport, a thousand-thousand lights indifferent to the drama of one small life and a canister now finally empty.

Nolan gathered himself, the chill of the hull seeping through his pressure suit—a sense of the universe’s breath passing over the “head” of the ship, unchanging, unerasable. He walked back along the curved spine, tracing the path of the distant starlight as it refracted off the hull and vanished into the endless dark. For the first time, he felt not so much loss but a deep, lingering emptiness—a shapeless ache made up of old wounds, recirculated air, and fading starlight. The universe spun on, vast and merciless, and Nolan was simply, irrevocably, himself.

Behind him, the blue of Aletheion continued to shine with indifferent beauty, spilled across his ship, and the Silent Void drifted onward—unmoved by grief, unburdened by memory, cradle and tomb beneath an endless sky. Far from any world, Nolan’s ritual vanished into starlight and thin air, and the universe went on, as it always does.

Singularity is built around four pillars: exploration, survival, combat, and trading. Players can advance in the game through numerous means such as mining, building, battling, and commerce. We are creating an infinite galaxy with infinite possibilities to give our players something valuable in return for their time in the Velorum Galaxy.

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