Endling Seek

What do you call someone who is blood of your blood, heritor of a similar ancient lineage, yet deeply changed? Whom you have never known dearly—in fact, barely at all—but whose echoes you see in the still pond, the polished glass?

Ahsa settles for "cousin."

Eir. Ur. Yul. Xol. Akka, dead Akka, whose everted bones circle Saturn in twin orbit with Titan, where Ahsa dreams. Of all the cousin-names, it is that one that catches Ahsa, rolls along her flukes and shivers, rippling, in the methane dream.

There is some mirror where Ahsa is the ship, Akka the refugee. An accident of parentage. One sibling this river, the other that stream.

And so how does Ahsa hate what she nearly was?

Cousin-bones, family-bones, swimming as she does. In her marrow, she knows this: she is lucky.

Dead Akka hums, and Ahsa feels it stem to stern. She stirs from her dream to roll as she listens, a long stretch of—(blade's edge) [CRYSTAL] (parchment)—and the breath of the galaxy along her flank.

Ahsa hums back, of course. She can't help herself, even knowing better. Your cousin calls out, "I am here! Is anyone there?" and you answer. You answer.

Dead Akka does not answer. It is a ghost-firing of bone-neurons. Xol does not answer. Xita and Sel and Ora and Leis do not answer.

Some glutted, war-fed cousin long across the sea of screams calls out, a distant wormsong threat. Ahsa goes quiet, remembers all at once. Presses her consciousness close to her Titan, settles back into a softer, subtler dream.

(In that dream, Ahsa is not the last.)