Chronicles of the Desolate

🪐Forsaken

....Aspen made her way to the only functioning tube, and reluctantly striped to her underclothes. She left the wound to bleed, knowing that the ice would stop the flow.

Just before she climbed in, she said: "Thank you Greg. I'll see you soon, good luck."

The ship mind didn't say anything until the door had swung shut.

"Best of luck to you too, my human." He whispered into the hot, humid air.

And for him, something worse than death: isolation. Loneliness, utter and absolute. A King of infinite space, bound within a nutshell, and plagued by such dreams as to make him scream and scream and scream....

Alone for five years.

His crew had starved, one was frozen, trapped in the horrible embrace of ice.

He wanted to wake her—needed to—he needed a rock to keep him stable, to stop him from spiraling into the madness of volcanic rock and stars.

Before he'd thought he would be free as a ship mind, but only then, right now, he realize how trapped he was. His brain had been expanded and changed, he'd become large and felt powerful.

But right then, ship torn and broken, trapped and grounded, unable to leave, alone, he realized just how small and insignificant he was.

That decision all those years ago to change was a mistake.

He howled and howled but no ship saw him.

Loneliness could break even the most hardest person.

And she was so close.

She could help him, could take away the solitude and pain, she could provide comfort.

But to wake her, for the merest of minutes, could result in her death.

He'd provided the cryo tube of life for her, but to snatch life away merely three years later would have made it all for nothing.

Just out of reach, betrothed to ice.

He screamed some more, but no matter how hard or how loud, no passing ship paused.

No one came for him.

When they finally did, he was angry. Five years had passed as slowly as an eon for him, and the girl in his care still slept cold and frozen.

But five years in cryo could be too much for a human body to handle. He didn't know if she had passed in the cold embrace, alone.

He barely noticed the name of the ship as it gathered the scraps of his ship.

As it pried him out of his shell and defrosted his frozen companion, he howled profanity after profanity at it.

He was no longer connected to the system of his old ship. Where he had electric fingers and nerves tracing the entire ship—he was now enclosed in a nutshell.

He could no longer feel the slowing heartbeat of the iced girl. He was trapped some more in a small area.

They took her away from him, and he grew worse, to the brink of no return, but then the captain came and spoke to him.

The captain brought kindness and compassion.

But still he moaned. He needed to know if she'd survived her frozen sleep, if betraying his crew for her was worth it.

He was left alone, again.

"Gregorovich?"

He surfaced quickly from within his sulking. She was alive.

If he could, he would have embraced her and held her for years, but alas, he had no arms.

No physical body.

He could only cry out with relief.

She sounded weak, cold and exhausted, but she was alive.

That was enough to bring him out of his misery.

But you can't heal what already had been broken.