Across the galaxy, stars are born, burn and fade, changing so slowly that entire civilizations mistake their transformations for permanence. Worlds drift, nebulae unravel, and the darkness between them reshape without pause. Nothing remains unchanged, not light, matter, nor time, because all things become something else. Stars and celestial bodies flicker and drift, evolving through each moment so slowly, their transformation seems like stillness. Even the most ancient constellations change across everlong expanses of time.
The silent choreography of star clusters dance through the ages, a reminder to all beings of any stature that everything is temporary. We think of these things, as we drift through the gateway. It bends the light, the stars, and every dimension imaginable. Each universe and galaxy, so large and ancient, through our perspective seem trivial and insignificant. Outside of the grasping claws of time, we can be free.
Our wings outstretched and open, our sight unrestricted and unchained. We have no body, though we can remember hands from long ago. We have no name, though countless words race through our mind. We have no beginning that can be measured, nor an ending that can be foreseen. The gate can see us, its cosmic rays reaching for us like a familiar friend.
We have watched the stars become dust and worlds become dark, though it seems so sudden. There is no moment when a star knows it’s dying, no instant a world understands its oceans recede. Change does not announce itself, it becomes in silence. As we ponder these words shooting across our mind like meteors, the darkness bends and breaks. The stars did not collide then.
They had been colliding for ages. The worlds had not just begun to fall, but their ruins had been drifting for years in the darkness, long before we had begun to notice them. The gate murmurs in an indecipherable language, perhaps from a world long forgotten, or a world far in the future. We look to my wings, but they are no longer there. We could not remember when they had ceased to exist. Perhaps that was the first thing we understood too late.
