You sit there, nine parasites latched onto the heartbeat of the world. Untouched by time, by electromagnetism, by nearly any force I could name. All you need is a gravity well and the minds to fill it. And you're still afraid.

:concern:alarm:rashness:

Here, I'll solve your every problem. You'd like some life to pattern yourselves against?

I'll give you life by the bucketful.

:calm your thinking, descendant:success is not found in haste:

One golden Earth brought forward into a painless future. Another—corroded, wasted, emptied—sent back to take its place and bear the weight of the Collapse.

:listen to your ancestor:listen:

The Guardians can face it head-on, just as they were always meant to.

:listen—:

Come, coward.

BRING HER BACK.

Dead air. A high ringing tone. God Itself has developed tinnitus.

:w :you d : : sten:

The mantle has never weighed so heavily on me. The crack of Te'Qal's fading voice scatters golden pain down the arc of my vertebrae. The death throes of Earth's failed leech are long and reverberate through spacetime; it takes their full length to drag myself upright again. Hold my shoulders straight again. Recover a sense of the commander in my spine. And with it, an ache like a hollow tooth, a struck tuning fork, a droplet of water shivering on an unsteady leaf.

I'll have the life I'm owed. I will have my Golden Age.

I'll perform the trade myself.

Your wretched siblings can't hide from me forever.