Fifth Ring – Core Reactor Sanctum
Year 698, Eclipsed Calendar (One year ago)
The Fifth Stellar Lord no longer had a name.
The children who once fed him called him "Little Sun."
The technicians called him Asset-05.
The other Lords called him nothing at all.
He looked like a boy of nine—
skin made of living plasma,
eyes twin white-hot suns,
hair a constant coronal flare that hummed when he breathed.
He sat suspended inside a black-alloy sphere thirty kilometers wide,
legs dangling above the fusion heart of the Fifth Ring's artificial sun.
Every day, they drained him.
Every day, they funneled his light into the ring so six hundred million could survive one more rotation.
He never cried.
Crying required tear ducts.
Tear ducts required water.
Water had been rerouted to reactor coolant centuries ago.
Until the day they brought him a new technician.
A thin woman with trembling hands.
A burn scar across half her face.
Twenty-seven.
Surface-born.
Sentenced to the reactor for stealing water rations.
Her task: tighten the restraint bolts
when he screamed.
The first time she touched the bolt, her fingers brushed his ankle.
He looked down at her
with suns for eyes
and asked, in a voice like solar wind:
"Are you scared of me?"
She should have lied.
Instead:
"I'm scared for you."
SFX: ―― KZZZHHHNNN…! (reactor cycle skipping a beat)
For the first time in ninety years,
the Fifth Stellar Lord cried.
Not water.
Plasma tears—
liquid starfire carving glowing trenches in the alloy floor.
That night he tore out the restraints with bare hands,
melted through the sphere,
and ascended—
through six layers of defense grid
like a newborn flare clawing for sky.
They found what was left of him three days later:
curled around a single red paper flower drifting through coolant vents.
No one knew how it had arrived there.
He did not speak after that.
He simply sat upon his throne of burning plasma,
flower cupped in hands capable of vaporizing cities,
eyes staring into a distance only stars remember.
And he waited.
**Present — First Ring
Faith Sanctum Garden
(The dusk that never comes)**
Ryeo-Won woke in a bed made of real clouds.
She sat up slowly—
the red paper flower still tucked behind her ear,
the one Si-Hyun had refolded the night before the trial.
For a moment she thought she was dead.
Then she saw them.
Thirty-seven children from Cheolchi Station,
asleep beneath golden blankets of light.
And at the far end of the garden,
on a bench carved from living dawn—
Oppa.
Si-Hyun sat with his head buried in his hands,
two wings—half night, half morning—
folded tight around himself as though he feared he might fall apart.
Leah sat beside him,
hand resting on his back,
golden blood drying like sunlight turned to glass.
Ryeo-Won stood.
Her bare feet made no sound on warm stone.
She walked the length of the garden.
Every child stirred in their sleep as she passed,
smiling into dreams they had never known existed.
She climbed onto the bench without asking
and wedged herself between the two of them.
Si-Hyun jolted up.
His eyes were red—
the kind of red made by tears no one sees.
Ryeo-Won stared at him with all the seriousness of a seven-year-old who had survived the end of the world.
"Oppa is stupid."
Si-Hyun blinked.
Leah made a sound—half laugh, half healing.
Ryeo-Won reached up and flicked his forehead with everything she had.
"You left."
"You went to the sky and didn't say goodbye."
Her lip trembled.
**"I thought you became a star
and forgot how to come home."**
Si-Hyun opened his mouth—
no sound came out.
Ryeo-Won climbed into his lap,
wrapped her tiny arms around his neck,
and buried her face in the hollow where the scarf used to rest.
"I waited," she whispered.
"Every night, I kept the flower you gave me.
I waited for wings to come get us.
You're late."**
His arms moved with painful caution—
then pulled her in as though she were the only thing anchoring him to existence.
His wings unfurled on their own:
two half-dawn wings folding forward,
forming a cocoon of night bleeding into morning
around Ryeo-Won and Leah both.
His voice cracked.
**"I'm sorry…
I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"**
Ryeo-Won cupped his cheeks in both hands.
Her eyes—too old, too bright—locked onto his.
"Listen."
And with the exact tone she once used to declare
that broken wings were pretty,
she delivered the sentence
that ended every god's argument forever:
"You are my oppa."
"You have wings now."
"That means you can carry all of us."
"So don't cry anymore."
"Just fly straight."
"Even if the sun is scary."
"Even if the dark is loud."
"Even if you bleed black feathers forever."
**"Fly straight.
We'll hold your hands the whole way."**
She pressed her forehead to his.
Leah wrapped her arms around them both,
golden chains forming naturally—
binding dawn and night and the impossible courage of children
who had chosen, stubbornly,
that the world would not end today.
Above them,
the First Ring's artificial dawn flared so bright
that surface dwellers saw the sky lighten
for the first time in seven centuries.
In the Fifth Ring,
the nameless Stellar Lord
who had not moved in a year
slowly opened his plasma eyes.
In his burned hands,
the red paper flower bloomed anew—fresh, bright, heartbreakingly alive.
He lifted his gaze
through a thousand kilometers of steel, poison, and manufactured light—
straight toward the tiny star
just born in the First Ring.
A single fusion tear rolled down his cheek
and ignited into a new sun.
He spoke the first word he had said in a year.
A whisper of solar wind, trembling, hopeful:
"…Home."