One night, beneath the high glass of a palace gallery, Aurelia watched the constellations drift across Terra's sky. Her halo—circling fire that did not burn—kept its patient orbit above her brow, as unassuming as breath.
"Why is Terra lonely?" she asked. "Father wears a crown—a golden laurel. Why does Terra have none?"
Malcador followed her gaze. The old stars had the tired look of lamps that had done their duty. He said little at first; he was careful with answers that might become roads. "Perhaps Terra is lonely," he said at last. "Perhaps that is why we build."
Aurelia took one more look at the night, at the dark between the lights. "Then she should be lonely no more."
When slept, she went inward—to the seam where she simply was—she did not step into the Immaterium as others know it. She walked a quiet, lucid interval between dimensions: not warp, not matter, not webway, but something that touched them all and beyond. She had always thought this was the Warp Malcador warned of, yet it did not wear his hellscape. It stretched like a black lake under starlight, dotted with pools whose surfaces sang, each song a different sound and light of its own. Aurelia soon learned this was different, a place only for her. And she played inside this vast endless space.
Aurelia leaned over a pool and saw what she called stars. They were not stars. They were whole things, slow harmonies of light—rooms within rooms, stacked skies, deep folds where distance forgot itself and time did not matter. Some felt like echoes, some like first mornings, some like paths that never end. She did not know their names; to her, some were stars and others only moving reflections. Names would not have helped. When her fingers skimmed their surface, ripples remembered, and each pool answered in a chord she somehow understood. When she cupped a little of that brightness and found her hands briefly empty, a new star arrived because she wished it so, and then she let that star drift back to the rest.
She was not forcing. She was asking. And the interval where she walked, she enjoyed saying yes.
Daemons and other neverborn could not find her here. They recoiled from her light or slid past as if her presence were glass without friction. Hunger had nothing to hook. Intent had nowhere to cling. This was a place of her own making—built without conscious craft, shaped to her measure—and what was not her could not abide within it, could not even name what it failed to grasp. The thing she was—a constant the warp could not price—bent the rules around her without bargain or blood; within that gentleness the wide pools agreed to be, and universes—whatever lay beyond the word—simply existed because she wished them to.
Even though she still didn't know what those pools contained. Perhaps that was a good thing. She was still a child, with he powers of creation and obliteration on her hands.
Sometimes she sat on the lip of nothing and listened. The pools hummed like choirs tuning before a symphony. Between the notes, there was a silence so honest it felt like kindness. In that kindness, ideas behaved.
She found the pool that held the Milky Way and bent until Terra's thin blue shone within its circle. Around it, the dark yawned like a pause between notes. A thought formed, simple and bright: Give Terra a crown.
She reached not with hands but with willingness. In the long dark well beyond Mars and Luna—past the dust and comets where the system thins and the sunlight grows polite—she guided lonely systems that wandered close to the edge of her notice. She did not drag them. She did not pluck them. She invited. What should have been impossible became simple because she asked kindly and held the shape of harmony in her mind.
Pieces gathered: a cold dwarf sun with two stilled worlds like beads on a wire; the broken remainder of a shepherd star—planets worn to pearls and scattered moons like seeds; a thin yellow sun that wanted company; a quiet red with a ring of ice; a lopsided clutch of rocks and one blue‑white gem that had forgotten a parent star; and, last, an empty orbit she thought would be beautiful if it had a light.
"Here," she said in the place that had no air. She thought of warmth in winter and put a small sun there—no more than a lantern to mark the path. The orbit accepted it as if it had been waiting. Numbers made themselves; the dance found its steps. Things that were dead agreed to be different. Things could agree to glow gently, and allowed other things to grow.
She kept the pattern in mind until it could keep itself. Where gravities argued, she taught them patience. Where paths crossed with too much pride, she suggested courtesy. She did not command. She arranged.
Six systems settled at a respectful distance in the deep black beyond Sol's dust—far from the traffic of Luna and Mars, far from the lanes ships would take when there were fleets enough to need lanes. They arranged themselves into a broad wreath, a laurel of faint lights about the system's distant rim. Each held its place not by force but by consent to a pattern she kept in mind until it could keep itself.
She watched the wreath close—green in idea, gold in meaning—and smiled. Terra would not be lonely now. Nor would Mars. Between them and the new lights, quiet corridors stretched like threads waiting to be woven.
She gave each station a small courtesy. The cold dwarf got companions that warmed by degrees. The broken shepherd received a tidier scattering, its pearls gathered into gentle strands. The thin yellow sun found a twin to talk to across a safe gap. The quiet red wore its ice like a collar that would not chafe. The lopsided clutch learned a slow waltz, so no stone needs bruising another. And the lantern sun—small and content—sat where an absence had been, happy to be useful.
On Terra, instruments old and careful woke to strangeness. A parallax where there had been none. A whisper of gravity in equations that had long ago settled. The Observatoria Palatina reported a hair‑width drift in star charts that had not moved since their engraving. A Sister‑Superior paused mid‑rounds and felt the null of her own aura deepen, then smooth; whatever had tried to reach them found nothing to touch. In a choir vault, the astropaths felt no pain, only a pressure like a hand smoothing a wrinkled page. A Navigator child on Luna blinked and shut her third eye without fear, having seen only the harmless outline of a crown.
Malcador stood on a balcony and let cold air bite his face. New lights where there had been none—six of them, faint as vows. He did not ask how. He would ask what now.
"Terra has a laurel," Aurelia said quietly beside him. "She will not be lonely."
Malcador considered the edges of that kindness. He thought of routes and threats and the long arithmetic of empire. He thought, too, of a child who asked nicely and the universe that said yes. "Then we will learn its uses," he said, "and its dangers. And we will keep it from becoming a shrine."
By dawn, cartographers would argue about nomenclature. The Officio Cartographica proposed provisional designations, the Mechanicum submitted binharic strings, then crossed them out—wary of creed. A memo drafted itself and waited for signatures:
Directive: On the Wreath Beyond Sol
Refer to the six distant systems as the Laurel for the purpose of navigation only.
No cultic appellations. No devotions. No hymns. Chart with care. Speak with care. Do not pray.
Malcador prepared a simpler entry in his private ledger: Six guardian lights, far, faint, consenting. A wreath for a lonely world. He did not call them a weapon. He did not call them a miracle.
Aurelia pressed her palms to the glass and watched the last of the night drain from the sky. "Thank you," she said—to Terra, to the interval, to no one in particular.
The Palace breathed out. Above, a laurel the colour of patience began its slow, invisible work.
By week's end, a remembrancer painted the sky from the Palace gardens and captured, by accident, a seventh fleck of light that had not been there the year before. She titled the canvas Sol in Company. A Custodian bought it and hung it where only sentries rested.
In the shipyards, an architect traced longer arcs on a drafting slate and did not know why the curves pleased him. On Mars, a Magos added a line to a canticle—laurel‑wide, laurel‑wise—and erased it before anyone could memorise the rhyme. In the Scholastia Psykana, a teacher told a class: "This is not precedent. It is context," and then wondered whom he was quoting.
Far out, in the thin dark where light takes its time, a dusting of comets revised their minds and decided to miss what they once intended to meet. Courtesy was contagious when taught well, an Oath Unsaid.
That night, Aurelia ate bread she had helped persuade the ovens to remember warm. She balanced crumbs in a circle on her plate, frowned, and then left two gaps so the ring could breathe. Malcador noticed and said nothing. Not all lessons are spoken.
"Will Terra thank me?" she asked.
"She already did," he said. "You heard it."
Aurelia considered this, then nodded once, solemn as only the playful can be. Her halo turned on its patient axle. Somewhere beyond the heliopause, six small systems kept faith with a pattern a child had offered them, and the dark between stars felt—if only slightly—less like a pause and more like a promise.