The Last Song Beneath the Stars. Content Warning.
Seren had always known she was the last.
The Observatory’s glass dome groaned beneath the winds that scoured the dead Earth, but she barely noticed anymore. The hum of the machines was her lullaby, the stars her only companions.
When the world fell silent decades ago, the radio towers had gone dark. She had been a child then, too young to grasp the word extinction, but old enough to remember what silence felt like after the voices vanished.
Now, she lived inside that silence.
Every night she climbed the spiral stair to the Observatory’s roof, wrapped herself in her father’s coat, and whispered the stars’ names as if they were prayers: Sirius, Vega, Altair, Deneb… Reciting them felt like calling ghosts back into existence.
It was on one such night, with her breath crystallizing in the air, that she heard it.
Not the wind. Not the groan of steel.
Music.
Faint, broken, buried in the static of her battered receiver. A voice—no, not a voice, but something like one—singing. Notes stretched like threads of light across the void.
Her hands shook as she turned the dials, clinging to the sound. For the first time in years, she wasn’t alone.
---
The song returned the next night. And the night after that.
Seren began to live for it. She would wait in trembling silence until the melody slid once more through the static. It was in no language she knew, yet emotion poured from every note. Longing. Sorrow. Beauty persisting beyond ruin.
She answered.
Her father had taught her the piano before the world ended. The Observatory’s instrument was cracked and stiff, but her fingers remembered. She played back through the transmitter—fragments of Chopin, Debussy, lullabies her mother once sang. She poured herself into the keys, praying something, someone, was listening.
And always, the song returned.
---
Weeks blurred into months. Seren pieced together fragments, learning patterns as though she were being taught a language built from music. She dreamed of the voice, of the being who sang back to her.
One night, the melody changed. It pulsed, insistent, repeating a sequence of rising and falling notes.
A message.
She mapped the pattern against the stars and froze. It pointed toward Orion’s belt, where clouds of gas shimmered like spilled ink.
It’s telling me where to go.
---
The Observatory had never been meant for travel, but the old escape shuttle buried beneath it still held promise. Her father had once forbidden her from touching it, saying it was only for the end.
Perhaps, she thought, this is the end—or the beginning.
She worked tirelessly, scavenging, repairing, teaching herself from brittle manuals. Her hands bled. Her body weakened. But the song drove her forward.
When at last the shuttle roared to life, she strapped herself in, embracing her father's coat still around her shoulders to not feel lonely. The engines screamed, and the horizon fell away. Grey deserts, broken oceans, forgotten cities shrank behind her, and the black sea of space opened its arms.
Seren wept. she wept screams of hope and happiness.
